<fl)ur CDUr §onu: 



A SERIES OF ENGLISH SKETCHES. 



OUR OLD HOME: 



A SEEIES OF ENGLISH SKETCHES. 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 




BOSTON: 

TICKNOR AND FIELDS. 

1863. 




N*,/, 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by 

Nathaniel Hawthorne, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 
STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY H. 0. HOUGHTON. 



To 
FRANKLIN PIERCE, 

AS A SLIGHT MEMORIAL OF A COLLEGE FRIENDSHIP, PROLONGED 

THROUGH MANHOOD, AND RETAINING ALL ITS VITALITY 

IN OUR AUTUMNAL YEARS, 

*E|)is Volume is EnscrtbeU 

BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



CONTENTS. 



Consular Experiences 9 

Leamington Spa 49 

About Warwick 77 

Recollections op a Gifted Woman 106 

Lichfield and Uttoxeter 141 

Pilgrimage to Old Boston 163 

Near Oxford 195 

Some of the Haunts of Burns 225 

A London Suburb 248 

Up the Thames 282 

Outside Glimpses of English Poverty 320 

Civic Banquets 358 



TO A FRIEND. 



I have not asked your consent, my dear General, to the 
foregoing inscription, because it would have been no inconsid- 
erable disappointment to me had you withheld it ; for I have 
long desired to connect your name with some book of mine, in 
commemoration of an early friendship that has grown old 
between two individuals of widely dissimilar pursuits and 
fortunes. I only wish that the offering were a Worthier one 
than this volume of sketches, which certainly are not of a 
kind likely to prove interesting to a statesman in retirement, 
inasmuch as they meddle with no matters of policy or govern- 
ment, and have very little to say about the deeper traits of 
national character. In then humble way, they belong entirely 
to aesthetic literature, and can achieve no higher success than 
to represent to the American reader a few of the external 
aspects of English scenery and life, especially those that are 
touched with the antique charm to which our countrymen are 
more susceptible than are the people among whom it is of 
native growth. 

I once hoped, indeed, that so slight a volume would not be 
all that I might write. These and other sketches, with which, 
in a somewhat rougher form than I have given them here, my 
journal was copiously filled, were intended for the side-scenes 
and backgrounds and exterior adornment of a work of fic- 
tion of which the plan had imperfectly developed itself in my 
mind, and into which I ambitiously proposed to convey more 
of various modes of truth than I could have grasped by a 
direct effort. Of course, I should not mention this abortive 
project, only that it has been utterly thrown aside and will 



x TO A FRIEND. 

never now be accomplished. The Present, the Immediate, the 
Actual, has proved too potent for me. It takes away not 
only my scanty faculty, but even my desire for imaginative 
composition, and leaves me sadly content to scatter a thousand 
peaceful fantasies upon the hurricane that is sweeping us all 
along with it, possibly, into a Limbo where our nation and its 
polity may be as literally the fragments of a shattered dream as 
my unwritten Romance. But I have far better hopes for our 
dear country ; and for my individual share of the catastrophe, 
I afflict myself little, or not at all, and shall easily find room 
for the abortive work on a certain ideal shelf, where are re- 
posited many other shadowy volumes of mine, more in num- 
ber, and very much superior in quality, to those which I have 
succeeded in rendering actual. 

To return to these poor Sketches ; some of my friends have 
told me that they evince an asperity of sentiment towards the 
English people which I ought not to feel, and which it is 
highly inexpedient to express. The charge surprises me, be- 
cause, if it be true, I have written from a shallower mood than 
I supposed. I seldom came into personal relations with an 
Englishman without beginning to like him, and feeling my 
favorable impression wax stronger with the progress of the 
acquaintance. I never stood in an English crowd without 
being conscious of hereditary sympathies. Nevertheless, it 
is undeniable that an American is continually thrown upon 
his national antagonism by some acrid quality in the moral 
atmosphere of England. These people think so loftily of 
themselves, and so contemptuously of everybody else, that it 
requires more generosity than I possess to keep always in per- 
fectly good humor with them. Jotting down the little acrimo- 
nies of the moment in my journal, and transferring them 
thence (when they happened to be tolerably well expressed) 
to these pages, it is very possible that I may have said things 
which a profound observer of national character would hesitate 
to sanction, though never any, I verily believe, that had not 



TO A FRIEND. XI 

more or less of truth. If they be true, there is no reason in 
the world why they should not be said. Not an Englishman 
of them all ever spared America for courtesy's sake or kind- 
ness ; nor, in my opinion, would it contribute in the least to 
our mutual advantage and comfort if we were to besmear one 
another all over with butter and honey. At any rate, we 
must not judge of an Englishman's susceptibilities by our own, 
which, likewise, I trust, are of a far less sensitive texture than 
formerly. 

And now farewell, my dear friend ; and excuse (if you think 
it needs any excuse) the freedom with which I thus publicly 
assert a personal friendship between a private individual and 
a statesman who has filled what was then the most august 
position in the world. But I dedicate my book to the Friend, 
and shall defer a colloquy with the Statesman till some 
calmer and sunnier hour. Only this let me say, that, with 
the record of your life in my memory, and with a sense of 
your character in my deeper consciousness as among the few 
things that time has left as it found them, I need no assurance 
that you continue faithful forever to that grand idea of an 
irrevocable Union, which, as you once told me, was the earli- 
est that your brave father taught you. For other men there 
may be a choice of paths — for you, but one ; and it rests 
among my certainties that no man's loyalty is more steadfast, 
no man's hopes or apprehensions on behalf of our national 
existence more deeply heartfelt, or more closely intertwined 
with his possibilities of personal happiness, than those of 
Franklin Pierce. 

The Wayside, July 2, 1863. 



OUR OLD HOME. 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

The Consulate of the United States, in my day, was 
located in Washington Buildings, (a shabby and smoke- 
stained edifice of four sto ri es high, thus illustriously named 
in honor of our national establishment,) at the lower cor- 
ner of Brunswick Street, contiguous to the Goree Ar- 
cade, and in the neighborhood of some of the oldest 
docks. This was by no means a polite or elegant portion 
of England's great commercial city, nor were the apart- 
ments of the American official so splendid as to indicate 
the assumption of much consular pomp on his part. A 
narrow and ill-lighted staircase gave access to an equally 
narrow and ill-lighted passage-way on the first floor, at 
the extremity of which, surmounting a door-frame, ap- 
peared an exceedingly stiff pictorial representation of the 
Goose and Gridiron, according to the English idea of 
those ever-to-be-honored symbols. The staircase and 
passage-way were often thronged, of a morning, with a 
set of beggarly and piratical-looking scoundrels, (I do no 
wrong to our own countrymen in styling them so, for not 
one in twenty was a genuine American,) purporting to 



10 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

belong to our mercantile marine, and chiefly composed of 
Liverpool Blackballers and the scum of every maritime 
nation on earth ; such being the seamen by whose assist- 
ance we then disputed the navigation of the world with 
England. These specimens of a most unfortunate class 
of people were shipwrecked crews in quest of bed, board, 
and clothing, invalids asking permits for the hospital, 
bruised and bloody wretches complaining of ill-treatment 
by their officers, drunkards, desperadoes, vagabonds, and 
cheats, perplexingly intermingled with an uncertain pro- 
portion of reasonably honest' men. All of them (save 
here and there a poor devil of a kidnapped landsman in 
his shore-going rags) wore red flannel shirts, in which 
they had sweltered or shivered throughout the voyage, 
and all required consular assistance in one form or 
another. 

Any respectable visitor, if he could make up his mind 
to elbow a passage among these sea-monsters, was admit- 
ted into an outer office, where he found more of the same 
species, explaining their respective wants or grievances 
to the Vice- Consul and clerks, while their shipmates 
awaited their turn outside the door. Passing through 
this exterior court, the stranger was ushered into an in- 
ner privacy, where sat the Consul himself, ready to give 
personal attention to such peculiarly difficult and more 
important cases as might demand the exercise of (what 
we will courteously suppose to be) his own higher judi- 
cial or administrative sagacity. 

It was an apartment of very moderate size, painted in 
imitation of oak, and duskily lighted by two windows 
looking across a by-street at the rough brick-side of an 
immense cotton warehouse, a plainer and uglier structure 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 11 

than ever was built in America. On the walls of the 
room hung a large map of the United States, (as they 
were, twenty years ago, but seem little likely to be, 
twenty years hence,) and a similar one of Great Britain, 
with its territory so provokingly compact, that we may 
expect it to sink sooner than sunder. Farther adornments 
were some rude engravings of our naval victories in the 
war of 1812, together with the Tennessee State House, 
and a Hudson River steamer, and a colored, life-size 
lithograph of General Taylor, with an honest hideousness 
of aspect, occupying ^e place of honor above the mantel- 
piece. On the top of a bookcase stood a fierce and ter- 
rible bust of General Jackson, pilloried in a military 
collar which rose above his ears, and, frowning forth im- 
mitigably at any Englishman who nnght happen to cross 
the threshold. I am afraid, however, that the truculence 
of the old General's expression was utterly thrown away 
on this stolid and obdurate race of men ; for, when they 
occasionally inquired whom this work of art represented, 
I was mortified to find that the younger ones had never 
heard of the battle of New Orleans, and that their elders 
had either forgotten it altogether, or contrived to mis- 
remember, and twist it wrong end foremost into something 
like an English victory. They have caught from the old 
Romans (whom they resemble in so many other charac- 
teristics) this excellent method of keeping the national 
glory intact by sweeping all defeats and humiliations clean 
out of their memory. Nevertheless, my patriotism for- 
bade me to take down either the bust or the pictures, 
both because it seemed no more than right that an Amer- 
ican Consulate .(being a little patch of our nationality im- 
bedded into the soil and institutions of England) should 



12 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

fairly represent the American taste in the fine arts, and 
because these decorations reminded me so delightfully of 
an old-fashioned American barber's shop. 

One truly English object was a barometer hanging on 
the wall, generally indicating one or another degree of 
disagreeable weather, and so seldom pointing to Fair, 
that I began to consider that portion of its circle as made 
superfluously. The deep chimney, with its grate of bitu- 
minous coal, was English too, as was also the chill tem- 
perature that sometimes called for a fire at mid-summer, 
and the foggy or smoky atmosphere which often, between 
November and March, compelled me to set the "jgaa 
aflame at noonday. I am not aware of omitting any- 
thing important in »the above descriptive inventory, un- 
less it be some bookshelves filled with octavo volumes 
of the American Statutes, and a good many pigeon-holes 
stuffed with dusty communications from former Secreta- 
ries of State, and other official documents of similar value, 
constituting part of the archives of the Consulate, which 
I might have done my successor a favor by flinging into 
the coal-grate. Yes ; there was one other article demand- 
ing prominent notice : the consular copy of the New 
Testament, bound in black morocco, and greasy, I fear, 
with a daily succession of perjured kisses ; at least, I can 
hardly hope that all the ten thousand oaths, administered 
by me between two breaths, to all sorts of people and on 
all manner of worldly business, were reckoned by the 
swearer as if taken at his soul's peril. 

Such, in short, was the dusky and stifled chamber in 
which I spent wearily a considerable portion of more 
than four good years of my existence. At first, to be 
quite frank with the reader, I looked upon it as not alto- 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 13 

gether fit to be tenanted by the commercial representative 
of so great and prosperous a country as the United States 
then were ; and I should speedily have transferred my 
headquarters to airier and loftier apartments, except for 
the prudent consideration that my Government would 
have left me thus to support its dignity at my own per- 
sonal expense. Besides, a long line of distinguished pred- 
ecessors, of whom the latest is now a gallant general 
under the Union banner, had found the locality good 
enough for them ; it might certainly be tolerated, the re- 
fore, by an individual so little ambitious of external mag- 
nificence as myself. So I settled quietly down, striking 
some of my roots into such soil as I could find, adapting 
myself to circumstances, and with so much success, that, 
though from first to ]|ist I hated the very sight of the 
little room, I should yet have felt a singular kind of re- 
luctance in changing it for a better. 

Hither, in the course of my incumbency, came a great 
variety of visitors, principally Americans, but including 
almost every other nationality on earth, especially the 
distressed and downfallen ones like those of Poland and 
Hungary. Italian bandits (for so they looked), pro- 
scribed conspirators from Old Spain, Spanish Ameri- 
cans, Cubans who professed to have stood by Lopez- 
and narrowly escaped his fate, scarred French soldiers 
of the Second Republic, — in a word, all sufferers, or pre- 
tended ones,, in the cause of Liberty, all people homeless 
in the widest sense, those who never had a country or 
had lost it, those whom their native land had impatiently 
flung off for planning a better system of tilings than they 
were born to, — a multitude of these, and, doubtless, an 
equal number of jail-birds, outwardly of the same feather, 



14 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

sought the American Consulate, in hopes of at least 
a bit of bread, and, perhaps, to beg a passage to the 
blessed shores of Freedom. In most cases there was 
nothing, and in any case distressingly little, to be done 
for them ; neither was I of a proselyting disposition, nor 
desired to make my Consulate a nucleus for the vagrant 
discontents of other lands. And yet it was a proud 
thought, a forcible appeal to the sympathies of an Amer- 
ican, that these unfortunates claimed the privileges of 
citizenship in our Republic on the strength of the very 
same noble misdemeanors that had rendered them out- 
laws to their native despotisms. So I gave them what 
small help I could. Methinks the true patriots and mar- 
tyr-spirits of the whole world should have been conscious 
of a pang near the heart, when a deadly blow was aimed 
at the vitality of a country which they have felt to be 
their own in the last resort. 

As for my countrymen, I grew better acquainted with 
many of our national characteristics during those four 
years than in all my preceding life. Whether brought 
more strikingly out by the contrast with English man- 
ners, or that my Yankee friends assumed an extra pecu- 
liarity from a sense of defiant patriotism, so it was that 
their tones, sentiments, and behavior, even their figures 
and cast of countenance, all seemed chiselled in sharper 
angles than ever I had imagined them to be at home. 
It impressed me with an odd idea of having somehow 
lost the property of my own person, when I occasionally 
heard one of them speaking of me as " my Consul ! " 
They often came to the Consulate in parties of half a 
dozen or more, on no business whatever, but merely to 
subject their public servant to a rigid examination, and 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 15 

see how he was getting on with his duties. These inter- 
views were rather formidable, being characterized by a 
certain stiffness which I felt to be sufficiently irksome at 
the moment, though it looks laughable enough in the 
retrospect. It is my firm belief that these fellow-citizens, 
possessing a native tendency to organization, generally 
halted outside of the door to elect a speaker, chairman, 
or moderator, and thus approached me with all the for- 
malities of a deputation from the American people. After 
salutations on both sides, — abrupt, awful, and severe on 
their part, and deprecatory on mine, — and the national 
ceremony of shaking hands being duly gone through 
with, the interview proceeded by a series of calm and 
well-considered questions or remarks from the spokes- 
man, (no other of the guests vouchsafing to utter a 
word,) and diplomatic responses from the Consul, who 
sometimes found the investigation a little more searching 
than he liked. I flatter myself, however, that, by much 
practice, I attained considerable skill in this kind of 
intercourse, the art of which lies in passing off common- 
places for new and valuable truths, and talking trash 
and emptiness in such a way that a pretty acute auditor 
might mistake it for something solid. If there be any 
better method of dealing with such junctures, — when 
talk is to be created out of nothing, and within the scope 
of several minds at once, so that you cannot apply your- 
self to your interlocutor's individuality, — I have not 
learned it. 

Sitting, as it were, in the gateway between the old 
world and the new, where the steamers and packets 
landed the greater part of our wandering countrymen, 
and received them again when their wanderings were 



16 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

done, I saw that' no people on earth have such vagabond 
habits as ourselves. The Continental races never travel 
at all, if they can help it ; nor does an Englishman ever 
think of stirring abroad, unless he has the money to spare, 
or proposes to himself some definite advantage from the 
journey; but it seemed to me that nothing was more 
common than for a young American deliberately to spend 
all his resources in an aesthetic peregrination about Eu- 
rope, returning with pockets nearly empty to begin the 
world in earnest. It happened, indeed, much oftener 
than was at all agreeable to myself, that their funds held 
out just long enough to bring them to the door of my 
Consulate, where they entered as if with an undeniable 
right to its shelter and protection, and required at my 
hands to be sent home again. In my first simplicity, — 
finding them gentlemanly in manners, passably educated, 
and only tempted a little beyond their means by a laud- 
able desire of improving and refining themselves, or, 
perhaps, for the sake of getting better artistic instruction 
in music, painting, or sculpture, than our country could 
supply, — I sometimes took charge of them on my pri- 
vate responsibility, since our Government gives itself no 
trouble about its stray children, except the seafaring 
class. But, after a few such experiments, discovering 
that none of these estimable and ingenuous young men, 
however trustworthy they might appear, ever dreamed 
of reimbursing the Consul, I deemed it expedient to take 
another course with them. Applying myself to some 
friendly shipmaster, I engaged homeward passages on 
their behalf, with the understanding that they were to 
make themselves serviceable on shipboard ; and I re- 
member several very pathetic appeals from painters and 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 17 

musicians, touching the damage which their artistic fin- 
gers were likely to incur from handling the ropes. But 
my observation of so many heavier troubles left me very 
little tenderness for their finger-ends. In time, I grew 
to be reasonably hard-hearted, though it never was quite 
possible to leave a countryman with no shelter save an 
English poor-house, when, as he invariably averred, he 
had only to set foot on his native soil to be possessed of 
ample funds. It was my ultimate conclusion, however, 
that American ingenuity may be pretty safely left to 
itself, and that, one way or another, a Yankee vagabond 
is certain to turn up at his own threshold, if he has any, 
without help of a consul, and perhaps be taught a lesson 
of foresight that may profit him hereafter. 

Among these stray Americans, I met with no other 
case so remarkable as that of an old man, who was in the 
habit of visiting me once in a few months, and soberly 
affirmed that he had been wandering about England more 
than a quarter of a century, (precisely twenty-seven 
years, I think,) and all the while doing his utmost to get 
home again. Herman Melville, in his excellent novel or 
biography of " Israel Potter," has an idea somewhat sim- 
ilar to this. The individual now in question was a mild 
and patient, but very ragged and pitiable old fellow, 
shabby beyond description, lean and hungry-looking, but 
with a large and somewhat red nose. He made no com- 
plaint of his ill-fortune, but only repeated in a quiet voice, 
with a pathos of which he was himself evidently uncon- 
scious, — "I want to get home to Ninety-second Street, 
Philadelphia." He described himself as a printer by 
trade, and said that he had come over when he was a 
younger man; in the hope of bettering himself, and for 
2 



18 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

the sake of seeing the Old Country, but had never since 
been rich enough to pay his homeward passage. His 
manner and accent did not quite convince me that he 
was an American, and I told him so ; but he steadfastly 
affirmed, — " Sir, I was born and have lived in Ninety- 
second Street, Philadelphia," and then went on to describe 
some public edifices and other local objects with which 
he used to be familiar, adding, with a simplicity that 
touched me very closely, " Sir, I had rather be there 
than, here ! " Though I still manifested a lingering 
doubt, he took no offence, replying with the same mild 
depression as at first, and insisting again and again on 
Ninety-second Street. Up to the time when I saw him, 
he still got a little occasional job-work at his trade, but 
subsisted mainly on such charity as he met with in his- 
wanderings, shifting from place to place continually, 
and asking assistance to convey him to his native land. 
Possibly he was an impostor, one of the multitudinous 
shapes of English vagabondism, and told his falsehood 
with such powerful simplicity, because, by many repeti- 
tions, he had convinced himself of its truth. But if, as 
I believe, the tale was fact, how very strange and sad 
was this old man's fate ! Homeless on a foreign shore, 
looking always towards his country, coming again and 
again to the point whence so many were setting sail for 
it, — so many who would soon tread in Ninety-second 
Street, — losing, in this long series of years, some of 
the distinctive characteristics of an American, and at 
last dying and surrendering his clay to be a portion of 
the soil whence he could not escape in his lifetime. 

He appeared to see that he had moved me, but did 
not attempt to press his advantage with any new argu- 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 19 

ment, or any varied form of entreaty. He had but 
scanty and scattered thoughts in his gray head, and in 
the intervals of those, like the refrain of an old ballad, 
came in the monotonous burden of his appeal, — " If 
I could only find myself in Ninety-second Street, Phila- 
delphia ! " But even his desire of getting home had 
ceased to be an ardent one, (if, indeed, it had not al- 
ways partaken of the dreamy sluggishness of his char- 
acter,) although it remained his only locomotive impulse, 
and perhaps the sole principle of life that kept his blood 
from actual torpor. 

The poor old fellow's story seemed to me almost as 
worthy of being chanted in immortal song as that of 
Odysseus or Evangeline. I took his case into deep con- 
sideration, but dared not incur the moral responsibility of 
sending liim across the sea, at his age, after so many 
years of exile, when the very tradition of him had passed 
away, to find his friends dead, or forgetful, or irretriev- 
ably vanished, and the whole country become more truly 
a foreign land to hini than England was now, — and even 
Ninety-second Street, in the weedlike decay and growth 
of our localities, made over anew and grown unrecogniz- 
able by his old eyes. That street, so patiently longed 
for, had transferred itself to the New Jerusalem, and he 
must seek it there, contenting his slow heart, mean- 
while, with the smoke-begrimed thoroughfares of English 
towns, or the green country lanes and by-paths with which 
his wanderings had made him familiar ; for doubtless he 
had a beaten track and was the " long-remembered beggar" 
now, with food and a roughly hospitable greeting ready 
for him at many a farm-house door, and his choice of 
lodging under a score of haystacks. In America, noth- 



20 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

ing awaited him but that worst form of disappointment 
which comes under the guise of a long-cherished and late- 
accomplished purpose, and then a year or two of dry and 
barren sojourn in an almshouse, and death among stran- 
gers at last, where he had imagined a circle of familiar 
faces. So I contented myself with giving him alms, 
which he thankfully accepted, and went away with bent 
shoulders and an aspect of gentle forlornness ; returning 
upon his orbit, however, after a few months, to tell the 
same sad and quiet story of his abode in England for 
more than twenty-seven years, in all winch time he had 
been endeavoring, and still endeavored as patiently as 
ever, to find his way home to Ninety-second Street, 
Philadelphia. 

I recollect another case, of a more ridiculous order, 
but still with a foolish kind of pathos entangled in it, 
which impresses me now more forcibly than it did at the 
moment. One day, a queer, stupid, good-natured, fat- 
faced individual came into my private room, dressed , in 
a sky-blue, cut-away coat and mixed trousers, both gar- 
ments worn and shabby, and rather too small for Ins 
overgrown bulk. After a little preliminary talk, he 
turned out to be a country shopkeeper, (from Connecti- 
cut, I think,) who had left a flourishing busmess, and 
come over to England purposely and solely to have an 
interview with the Queen. Some years before he had 
named his two children, one for Her Majesty and the 
other for Prince Albert, and had transmitted photographs 
of the little people, as well as of his wife and himself, to 
the illustrious godmother. The Queen had gratefully 
acknowledged the favor in a letter under the hand of 
her private secretary. Now, the shopkeeper, like a great 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 21 

many other Americans, had long cherished a fantastic 
notion that he was one of the rightful heirs of a rich 
English estate ; and on the strength of Her Majesty's 
letter and the hopes of royal patronage winch it inspired, 
he had shut up his little country-store and come over to 
claim his inheritance. On the voyage, a German fellow- 
passenger had relieved him of his money on pretence of 
getting it favorably exchanged, and had disappeared im- 
mediately on the ship's arrival ; so that the poor fellow 
was compelled to pawn all his clothes except the remark- 
ably shabby ones in which I beheld him, and in which 
(as he himself hinted, with a melancholy, yet good- 
natured smile) he did not look altogether fit to see the 
Queen. I agreed with him that the bobtailed coat and 
mixed trousers constituted a very odd-looking court-dress, 
and suggested that it was doubtless his present purpose 
to get back to Connecticut as fast as possible. But no ! 
•The resolve to see the Queen was as strong in him as 
ever ; and it was marvellous the pertinacity with which 
he clung to it amid raggedness and starvation, and the 
earnestness of his supplication that I would supply him 
with funds for a suitable appearance at AVindsor Castle. 
I never had so satisfactory a perception of a complete 
booby before in my life ; and it caused me to feel kindly 
towards him, and yet impatient and exasperated on be- 
half of common sense, which could not possibly tolerate 
that such an unimaginable donkey should exist. I laid 
his absurdity before him in the very plainest terms, but 
without either exciting his anger or shaking his resolu- 
tion. " Oh, my dear man," quoth he, with good-natured 
placid, simple, and tearful stubbornness, "if you could but 
enter into my feelings and see the matter from beginning 



22 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

to end as I see it ! " To confess the truth, I have since 
felt that I was hard-hearted to the poor simpleton, and 
that there was more weight in his remonstrance than I 
chose to be sensible of, at the time ; for, like many men 
who have been in the habit of making playthings or tools 
of their imagination and sensibility, I was too rigidly 
tenacious of what was reasonable in the affairs of real 
life. And even absurdity has its rights, when, as in this 
case, it has absorbed a human being's entire nature and 
purposes. I ought to have transmitted him to Mr. 
Buchanan, in London, who, being a good-natured old 
gentleman, and anxious, just then, to gratify the univer- 
sal Yankee nation, might, for the joke's sake, have got 
him admittance to the Queen, who had fairly laid herself 
open to his visit, and has received hundreds of our coun- 
trymen on infinitely slighter grounds. But I was inex- 
orable, being turned to flint by the insufferable proximity 
of a fool, and refused to interfere with his business in 
any way except to procure him a passage home. I can 
see his face of mild, ridiculous despair, at this moment, 
and appreciate, better than I could then, how aAvfully 
cruel he must have felt my obduracy to be. For years 
and years, the idea of an interview with Queen Victoria 
had haunted his poor foolish mind ; and now, when he 
really stood on English ground, and the palace-door was 
hanging ajar for him, he was expected to turn back, a 
pennyless and bamboozled simpleton, merely because an 
iron-hearted consul refused to lend him thirty shillings 
(so low had his demand ultimately sunk) to buy a second- 
class ticket on the rail for London ! 

He visited the Consulate several times afterwards, 
subsisting on a pittance that I allowed him in the hope 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 23 

of gradually starving him back to Connecticut, assailing 
me with the old petition at every opportunity, looking 
shabbier at every visit, but still thoroughly good-tem- 
pered, mildly stubborn, and smiling through his tears, 
not without a perception of the ludicrousness of his own 
position. Finally, he disappeared altogether, and whither 
he had wandered, and whether he ever saw the Queen, 
or wasted quite away in the endeavor, I never knew ; 
but I remember unfolding the " Times," about that period, 
with a daily dread of reading an account of a ragged 
Yankee's attempt to steal into Buckingham Palace, and 
how he smiled tearfully at his captors and besought them 
to introduce him to Her Majesty. I submit to Mr. Sec- 
retary Seward that he ought to make diplomatic remon- 
strances, to the British Ministry, and require them to take 
such order that the Queen shall not any longer bewilder 
the wits of our poor compatriots by responding to their 
epistles and thanking them for their photographs. 

One circumstance in the foregoing incident — I mean 
the unhappy storekeeper's notion of establishing his claim 
to an English estate — was common to a great many 
other applications, personal or by letter, with which I 
was favored by my countrymen. The cause of this pe- 
culiar insanity lies deep in the Anglo-American heart. 
After all these bloody wars and vindictive animosities^ 
we have still an unspeakable yearning towards England. 
When our forefathers left the old home, they pulled up 
many of their roots, but trailed along with them others, 
which were never snapt asunder by the tug of such a 
lengthening distance, nor have been torn out of the orig- 
inal soil by the violence of subsequent struggles, nor sev- 
ered by the edge of the sword. Even so late as these 



24 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

days, they remain entangled with our heart-strings, and 
might often have influenced our national cause like the 
tiller-ropes of a ship, if the rough gripe of England had 
been capable of managing so sensitive a kind of machin- 
ery. It has required nothing less than the boorishness, 
the stolidity, the self-sufficiency, the contemptuous jeal- 
ousy, the half-sagacity, invariably blind of one eye and 
often distorted of the other, that characterize this strange 
people, to compel us to be a great nation in our own 
right, instead of continuing virtually, if not in name, a 
province of their small island. What pains did they take 
to shake us off, and have ever since taken to keep us 
wide apart from them ! It might seem their folly, but 
was really their fate, or, rather, the Providence of God, 
who has doubtless a work for us to do, in which the mas- 
sive materiality of the English character would have 
been too ponderous a dead-weight upon our progress. 
And, besides, if England had been wise enough to twine 
our new vigor round about her ancient strength, her 
power would have been too firmly established ever to 
yield, in its due season, to the otherwise immutable law 
of imperial vicissitude. The earth might then have 
beheld the intolerable spectacle of a sovereignty and 
institutions, imperfect, but indestructible. 

Nationally, there has ceased to be any peril of so inaus- 
picious and yet outwardly attractive an amalgamation. 
But as an individual, the American is often conscious of 
the deep-rooted sympathies that belong more fitly to times 
gone by, and feels a blind, pathetic tendency to wander 
back again, which makes itself evident in such wild 
dreams as I have alluded to above, about English inher- 
itances. A mere coincidence of names, (the Yankee 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 25 

one, perhaps, having been assumed by legislative per- 
rninnimtj n supposititious pedigree, a silver mug on which 
an anciently engraved coat-of-arnis has been half scrubbed 
out, a seal with an uncertain crest, an old yellow letter or 
document in faded ink, the more scantily legible the bet- 
ter, — rubbish of this kind, found in a neglected drawer, 
has been potent enough to turn the brain of many an 
honest Republican, especially if assisted by an advertise- 
ment for lost heirs, cut out of a .British newspaper. 
There is no estimating or believing, till we come into a 
position to know it, what foolery lurks latent in the 
breasts of very sensible people. Remembering such 
sober extravagances, I should not be at all surprised 
to find that I am myself guilty of some unsuspected 
absurdity, that may appear to me the most substantial 
trait in my character. 

I might fill many pages with instances of this diseased 
American appetite for English soil. A respectable-look- 
ing woman, well advanced in life, of sour aspect, exceed- 
ingly homely, but decidedly New Englandish in figure 
and manners, came to my office with a great bundle of 
documents, at the very first glimpse of which I appre 
hended something terrible. Nor was I mistaken. The 
bundle contained evidences of her indubitable claim to 
the site on which Castle Street, the Town Hall, the Ex- 
change, and all the principal business part of Liverpool, 
have long been situated ; and with considerable peremp- 
toriness, the good lady signified her expectation that I 
should take charge of her suit, and prosecute it to judg- 
ment ; not, however, on the equitable condition of receiv- 
ing half the value of the property recovered, (which, in 
case of complete success, would have made both of us ten 



26 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

or twenty-fold millionnaires,) but without recompense or 
reimbursement of legal expenses, solely as an incident of 
my official duty. Another time came two ladies, bearing 
a letter of emphatic introduction from his Excellency the 
Governor of their native State, who testified in most 
satisfactory terms to their social respectability. They 
were claimants of a great estate in Cheshire, and 
announced themselves as blood-relatives of Queen Vic- 
toria, — a point, however, which they deemed it expe- 
dient to keep in the background until their territorial 
rights should be established, apprehending that the Lord 
High Chancellor might otherwise be less likely to come 
to a fair decision in respect to them, from a probable dis- 
inclination to admit new members into the royal kin. 
Upon my honor, I imagine that they had an eye to the 
possibility of the eventual succession of one or both of 
them to the crown of Great Britain through superior- 
ity of title over the Brunswick line ; although, being 
maiden ladies, like their predecessor Elizabeth, they 
could hardly have hoped to establish a lasting dynasty 
upon the throne. It proves, I trust, a certain disinter- 
estedness on my part, that, encountering them thus in the 
dawn of their fortunes, I forbore to put in a plea for a 
future dukedom. 

Another visitor of the same class was a gentleman of 
refined manners, handsome figure, and remarkably intel- 
lectual aspect. Like many men of an adventurous cast, 
he had so quiet a deportment, and such an apparent dis- 
inclination to general sociability, that you would have 
fancied him moving always along some peaceful and 
secluded walk of life. Yet, literally from Ins first hour, 
he had been tossed upon the surges of a most varied and 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 27 

tumultuous existence, having been born at sea, of Amer- 
ican parentage, but on board of a Spanish vessel, and 
spending many of the subsequent years in voyages, trav- 
els, and outlandish incidents and vicissitudes, which, 
methought, had hardly been paralleled since the days of 
Gulliver or De Foe. When his dignified reserve was 
overcome, he had the faculty of narrating these adven- 
tures with wonderful eloquence, working up his descrip- 
tive sketches with such intuitive perception of the 
picturesque points that the whole was thrown forward 
with a positively illusive effect, like matters of your own 
visual experience. In fact, they were so admirably done 
that I could never more than half believe them, because 
the genuine affairs of life are not apt to transact them- 
selves so artistically. Many of his scenes were laid in 
the East, and among those seldom visited archipelagoes 
of the Indian Ocean, so that there was an Oriental fra- 
grance breathing through his talk and an odor of the 
Spice Islands still lingering in his garments. He had 
much to say of the delightful qualities of the Malay 
pirates, who, indeed, carry on a predatory warfare against 
the ships of all civilized nations, and cut every Christian 
throat among their prisoners ; but (except for deeds of 
that character, which are the rule and habit of their life, 
and matter of religion and conscience with them,) they 
are a gentle-natured people, of primitive innocence mid 
integrity. 

But his best story Avas about a race of men, (if men 
they w r ere,) who seemed so fully to realize Swift's 
wicked fable of the Yahoos, that my friend was much 
exercised with psychological speculations whether or no 
they had any souls. • They dwelt in the wilds of Ceylon, 



28 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

like other savage beasts, hairy, and spotted with tufts of 
fur, filthy, shameless, weaponless, (though warlike in 
their individual bent,) tool-less, houseless, language-less, 
except for a few guttural sounds, hideously dissonant, 
whereby they held some rudest kind of communication 
among themselves. They lacked both memory and fore- 
sight, and were wholly destitute of government, social 
institutions, or law or rulership of any description, except 
the immediate tyranny of the strongest ; radically un- 
tamable, moreover, save that the people of the country 
managed to subject a few of the less ferocious and stupid 
ones to out-door servitude among their other cattle. 
They were beastly in almost all their attributes, and that 
to such a degree that the observer, losing sight of any 
link betwixt them and manhood, could generally witness 
their brutalities without greater horror than at those of 
some disagreeable quadruped in a menagerie. And yet, 
at times, comparing what were the lowest general traits 
in his own race, with what was highest in these abomi- 
nable monsters, he found a ghastly similitude that half 
compelled him to recognize them as human brethren. 

After these Gulliverian researches, my agreeable ac- 
quaintance had fallen under the ban of the Dutch gov- 
ernment, and had suffered (this, at least, being matter 
of fact) nearly two years' imprisonment with confiscation 
of a large amount of property, for which Mr. Belmont, 
our minister at the Hague, had just made a peremptory 
demand of reimbursement and damages. Meanwhile, 
since arriving in England on his way to the United 
States, he had been providentially led to inquire into the 
circumstances of his birth on shipboard, and had discov- 
ered that not himself alone, but another baby, had come 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 29 

into the world during the same voyage of the prolific ves- 
sel, and that there were almost irrefragable reasons for 
believing that these two children had been assigned to 
the wrong mothers. Many reminiscences of his early 
days confirmed him in the idea that his nominal parents 
were aware of the exchange. The family to which he 
felt authorized to attribute his lineage was that of a 
nobleman, in the picture-gallery of whose country-seat 
(whence, if I mistake not, our adventurous friend had 
just returned) he had discovered a portrait bearing a 
striking resemblance to himself. As soon as he should 
have reported the outrageous action of the Dutch gov- 
ernment to President Pierce and the Secretary of State, 
and recovered the confiscated property, he purposed to 
return to England and establish his claim to the noble- 
man's title and estate. 

I had accepted his Oriental fantasies, (which, indeed, to 
do him justice, have been recorded by scientific societies 
among the genuine phenomena of natural history,) not 
as matters of indubitable credence, but as allowable 
specimens of an imaginative traveller's vivid coloring and 
rich embroidery on the coarse texture and dull neutral 
tints of truth. The English romance was among the 
latest communications that he intrusted to my private 
ear ; and as soon as I heard the first chapter, — so won- 
derfully akin to what I might have wrought out of my 
<>wn head, not unpractised in such figments, — I began to 
repent having made myself responsible for the future 
nobleman's passage homeward in the next Collins 
steamer. Nevertheless, should Iris English rent-roll 
tall a little behindhand, his Dutch claim for a hundred 
thousand dollars was certainly in the hands of our gov- 



30 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

eminent, and might at least be valuable to the extent of 
thirty pounds, which I had engaged to pay on his behalf. 
But I have reason to fear that his Dutch riches turned 
out to be Dutch gilt or fairy gold, and his English coun- 
try-seat a mere castle in the air, — which I exceedingly 
regret, for he was a delightful companion and a very 
gentlemanly man. 

A Consul, in his position of universal responsibility, 
the general adviser and helper, sometimes finds himself 
compelled to assume the guardianship of personages who, 
in their own sphere, are supposed capable of superintend- 
ing the highest interests of whole communities. An 
elderly Irishman, a naturalized citizen, once put the 
desire and expectation of all our penniless vagabonds 
into a very suitable phrase, by pathetically entreating 
me to be a " father to him ; " and, simple as I sit scrib- 
bling here, I have acted a father's part, not only by 
scores of such unthrifty old children as himself, but by a 
progeny of far loftier pretensions. It may be well for 
persons who are conscious of any radical weakness in 
their character, any besetting sin, any unlawful propen- 
sity, any unhallowed impulse, which (while surrounded 
with the manifold restraints that protect a man from that 
treacherous and lifelong enemy, his lower self, in the 
circle of society where he is at home) they may have 
succeeded in keeping under the lock and key of strictest 
propriety, — it may be well for them, before seeking the 
perilous freedom of a distant land, released from the 
watchful eyes of neighborhoods and coteries, lightened of 
that wearisome burden, an immaculate name, and bliss- 
fully obscure after years of local prominence, — it may 
be well for such individuals to know that when they set 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 31 

foot on a foreign shore, the long-imprisoned Evil, scenting 
a wild license in the unaccustomed atmosphere, is apt to 
grow riotous in its iron cage. It rattles the rusty bar- 
riers with gigantic turbulence, and if there be an infirm 
joint anywhere in the framework, it breaks madly forth, 
compressing the mischief of a lifetime into a little space. 

A parcel of letters had been accumulating at the Con- 
sulate for two or three weeks, directed to a certain Doctor 
of Divinity, who had left America by a sailing-packet 
and was still upon the sea. In due time, the vessel 
arrived, and the reverend Doctor paid me a visit. He 
was a fine-looking middle-aged gentleman, a perfect model 
of clerical propriety, scholar-like, yet with the air of a man 
of the world rather than a student, though overspread 
with the graceful sanctity of a popular metropolitan 
divine, a part of whose duty it might be to exemplify the 
natural accordance between Christianity and good-breed- 
ing. He seemed a little excited, as an American is apt 
.to be on first arriving in England, but conversed with 
intelligence as well as animation, making himself so 
agreeable that his visit stood out in considerable relief 
from the monotony of my daily commonplace. As I 
learned from authentic sources, he was somewhat distin- 
guished in his own region for fervor and eloquence in the 
pulpit, but was now compelled to relinquish it temporarily 
for the purpose of renovating his impaired health by an 
extensive tour in Europe. Promising to dine with me, 
he took up his bundle of letters and went away. 

The Doctor, however, failed to make his appearance at 
dinner-time, or to apologize the next day for his absence ; 
and in the course of a day or two more, I forgot all about 
him, concluding that he must have set forth on his con- 



32 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

tinental travels, the plan of which he had sketched out at 
our interview. But, by and by, I received a call from 
the master of the vessel in which he had arrived. He 
was in some alarm about his passenger, whose luggage 
remained on shipboard, but of whom nothing had been 
heard or seen since the moment of his departure from the 
Consulate. We conferred together, the Captain and I, 
about the expediency of setting the police on the traces 
(if any were to be found) of our vanished friend ; but it 
struck me that the good Captain was singularly reticent, 
and that there was something a little mysterious in a few 
points that he hinted at, rather than expressed ; so that, 
scrutinizing the affair carefully, I surmised that the inti- 
macy of life on shipboard might have taught him more 
about the reverend gentleman than, for some reason or 
other, he deemed it prudent to reveal. At home, in our 
native country, I would have looked to the Doctor's per- 
sonal safety and left his reputation to take care of itself, 
knowing that the good fame of a thousand saintly clergy-, 
men would amply dazzle out any lamentable spot on a 
single brother's character. But in scornful and invidious 
England, on the idea that the credit of the sacred office 
was measurably intrusted to my discretion, I could not 
endure, for the sake of American Doctors of Divinity 
generally, that this particular Doctor should cut an 
ignoble figure in the police reports of the English news- 
papers, except at the last necessity. The clerical body, I 
flatter myself, will acknowledge that I acted on their own 
principle. Besides, it was now too late ; the mischief 
and violence, if any had been impending, were not of a 
kind which it requires the better part of a week to per- 
petrate ; and to sum up the entire matter, I felt certain. 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 33 

from a good deal of somewhat similar experience, that, if 
the missing Doctor still breathed this vital air, he would 
turn up at the Consulate as soon as his money should be 
stolen or spent. 

Precisely a week after this reverend person's disappear- 
ance, there came to my office a tall, middle-aged gentle- 
man in a blue military surtout, braided at the seams, but 
out at elbows, and as shabby as if the wearer had been 
bivouacking in it throughout a Crimean campaign. It 
was buttoned up to the very chin, except where three or 
four of the buttons were lost ; nor was there any glimpse 
of a white shirt-collar illuminating the rusty black cravat. 
A grisly moustache was just beginning to roughen the 
stranger's upper lip. He looked disreputable to the last 
degree, but still had a ruined air of good society glim- 
mering about him, like a few specks of polish on a sword- 
blade that has lain corroding in a mud-puddle. I took 
him to be some American marine officer, of dissipated 
habits, or perhaps a cashiered British major, stumbling 
into the wrong quarters through the unrectified bewilder- 
ment of last night's debauch. He greeted me, however, 
with polite familiarity, as though we had been previously 
acquainted; whereupon I drew coldly back (as sensible 
people naturally do, whether from strangers or former 
friends, when too evidently at odds with fortune) and re- 
quested to know who my visitor might be, and what was 
his business at the Consulate. " Am I then so changed ? " 
he exclaimed with a vast depth of tragic intonation ; and 
after a little blind and bewildered talk, behold ! the truth 
flashed upon me. It was the Doctor of Divinity ! If I 
had meditated a scene or a coup de theatre, I could not 
have contrived a more effectual one than by this simple 
3 



34 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

and genuine difficulty of recognition. The poor Divine 
must have felt that he had lost his personal identity 
through the misadventures of one little week. And, to 
say the truth, he did look as if, like Job, on account of 
his especial sanctity, he had been delivered over to the 
direst temptations of Satan, and proving weaker than the 
man of Uz, the Arch Enemy had been empowered to 
drag him through Tophet, transforming him, in the pro- 
cess, from the most decorous of metropolitan clergymen 
into the rowdiest and dirtiest of disbanded officers. I 
never fathomed the mystery of his military costume, but 
conjectured that a lurking sense of fitness had induced 
him to exchange his clerical garments for this habit of a 
sinner ; nor can I tell precisely into what pitfall, not more 
of vice than terrible calamity, he had precipitated him- 
self, — being more than satisfied to know that the out- 
casts of society can sink no lower than this poor, de- 
secrated wretch had sunk. 

The opportunity, I presume, does not often happen to 
a layman, of administering moral and religious reproof to 
a Doctor of Divinity; but finding the occasion thrust 
upon me, and the hereditary Puritan waxing strong in 
my breast, I deemed it a matter of conscience not to let 
it pass entirely unimproved. The truth is, I was un- 
speakably shocked and disgusted. Not, however, that I 
was then to learn that clergymen are made of the same 
flesh and blood as other people, and perhaps lack one 
small safeguard which the rest of us possess, because 
they are aware of their own peccability, and therefore 
cannot look up to the clerical class for the proof of the 
possibility of a pure life on earth, with such reverential 
confidence as we are prone to do. But I remembered 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 35 

the innocent faith of my boyhood, and the good old 
silver-headed clergyman, who seemed to me as much a 
saint then on earth as he is now in heaven, and partly 
for whose sake, through all these darkening years, I re- 
tain a devout, though not intact nor unwavering respect 
for the entire fraternity. What a hideous wrong, there- 
fore, had the backslider inflicted on his brethren, and still 
more on me, who much needed whatever fragments of 
broken reverence (broken, not as concerned religion, but 
its earthly institutions and professors), it might yet be 
possible to patch into a sacred image ! Should all pul- 
pits and communion-tables have thenceforth a stain upon 
them, and the guilty one go unrebuked for it? So I 
spoke to the unhappy man as I never thought myself war- 
ranted in speaking to any other mortal, hitting him hard, 
doing my utmost to find out his vulnerable part, and 
prick him into the depths of it. And not without more 
effect than I had dreamed of, or desired ! 

No doubt, the novelty of the Doctor's reversed position, 
thus standing up to receive such a fulmination as the 
clergy have heretofore arrogated the exclusive right of 
inflicting, might give additional weight and sting to the 
words which I found utterance for. But there was 
another reason (which, had I in the least suspected it, 
would have closed my lips at once,) for his feeling mor- 
bidly sensitive to the cruel rebuke that I administered. 
The unfortunate man had come to me, laboring under one 
of the consequences of his riotous outbreak, in the shape 
of delirium tremens ; he bore a hell within the compass of 
his own breast, all the torments of which blazed up with 
tenfold inveteracy when I thus took upon myself the devil's 
office of stirring up the red-hot embers. His emotions, 



36 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

as well as the external movement and expression of them 
by voice, countenance, and gesture, were terribly exag- 
gerated by the tremendous vibration of nerves resulting 
from the disease. It was the deepest tragedy I ever wit- 
nessed. I know sufficiently, from that one experience, 
how a condemned soul would manifest its agonies; and 
for the future, if I have anything to do with sinners, I 
mean to operate upon them through sympathy, and not 
rebuke. What had I to do with rebuking him ? The 
disease, long latent in his heart, had shown itself in a 
frightful eruption on the surface* of his life. That was 
all ! Is it a thing to scold the sufferer for ? 

To conclude this wretched story, the poor Doctor of 
Divinity, having been robbed of all his money in this 
little airing beyond the limits of propriety, was easily 
persuaded to give up the intended tour and return to his 
bereaved flock, who, very probably, were thereafter con- 
scious of an increased unction in his soul-stirring elo- 
quence, without suspecting the awful depths into which 
their pastor had dived in quest of it. His voice is now 
silent. I leave it to members of his own profession to 
decide" whether it was better for him thus to sin outright, 
and so to be let into the miserable secret what manner of 
man he was, or to have gone through life outwardly un- 
spotted, making the first discovery of his latent evil at 
the judgment-seat. It has occurred to me tilat his dire 
calamity, as both he and I regarded it, might have been 
the only method by which precisely such a man as him- 
self, and so situated, could be redeemed. He has learned, 
ere now, how that matter stood. 

For a man, with a natural tendency to meddle with 
other people's business, there could not possibly be a 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 37 

more congenial sphere than the Liverpool Consulate. 
For myself, I had never been in the habit of feeling that 
I could sufficiently comprehend any particular conjunction 
of circumstances with human character, to justify me in 
thrusting in my awkward agency among the intricate and 
unintelligible machinery of Providence. I have always 
hated to give advice, especially when there is a prospect 
of its being taken. It is only one-eyed people who love 
to advise, or have any spontaneous promptitude of action. 
When a man opens both his eyes, he generally sees about 
as many reasons for acting in any one way as in any 
other, and quite as many for acting in neither ; and is 
therefore likely to leave his friends to regulate their own 
conduct, and also to remain quiet as regards his especial 
affairs till necessity shall prick him onward. Neverthe- 
less, the world and individuals flourish upon a constant 
succession of blunders. The secret of English practical 
success lies in their characteristic faculty of shutting one 
eye, whereby they get so distinct and decided a view of 
what immediately concerns them that they go stumbling 
towards it over a hundred insurmountable obstacles, and 
achieve a magnificent triumph without ever being aware 
of half its difficulties. If General McClellan could but 
have shut his left eye, the right one would long ago have 
guided us into Richmond. Meanwhile, I have strayed 
far away from the Consulate, where, as I was about to 
say, I was compelled, in spite of my disinclination, to im- 
part both advice and assistance in multifarious affairs 
that did not personally concern me, and presume that I 
effected about as little mischief as other men in similar 
contingencies. The duties of the office carried me to 
prisons, police-courts, hospitals, lunatic asylums, coroner's 



38 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

inquests, death-beds, funerals, and brought me in contact 
with insane people, criminals, ruined speculators, wild 
adventurers, diplomatists, brother-consuls, and all manner 
of simpletons and unfortunates, in greater number and 
variety than I had ever dreamed of as pertaining to 
America ; in addition to whom there was an equivalent 
multitude of English rogues, dexterously counterfeiting 
the genuine Yankee article. It required great discrim- 
ination not to be taken in by these last-mentioned scoun- 
drels ; for they knew how to imitate our national traits, 
had been at great pains to instruct themselves as regarded 
American localities, and were not readily to be caught 
by a cross-examination as to the topographical features, 
public institutions, or prominent inhabitants, of the places 
where they pretended to belong. The best shibboleth I 
ever hit upon lay in the pronunciation of the word 
" been," which the English invariably make to rhyme 
with "green," and we Northerners, at least, (in accord- 
ance, I think, with the custom of Shakspeare's time,) uni- 
versally pronounce " bin." 

All the matters that I have been treating of, however, 
were merely incidental, and quite distinct from the real 
business of the office. A great part of the wear and 
tear of mind and temper resulted from the bad relations 
between the seamen and officers of American ships. 
Scarcely a morning passed, but that some sailor came to 
show the marks of his ill-usage on shipboard. Often, it 
was a whole crew of them, each with his broken head or 
livid bruise, and all testifying with one voice to a constant 
series of savage outrages during the voyage ; or, it might 
be, they laid an accusation of actual murder, perpetrated 
by the first or second officers with many blows of 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 39 

steel-knuckles, a rope's end, or a marline-spike, or by the 
captain, in the twinkling of an eye, with a shot of his 
pistol. Taking the seamen's view of the case, you would 
suppose that the gibbet was hungry for the murderers. 
Listening to the Captain's defence, you would seem to 
discover that he and his officers were the humanest of 
mortals, but were driven to a wholesome severity by the 
mutinous conduct of the crew, who, moreover, had them- 
selves slain their comrade in the drunken riot and confu- 
sion of the first day or two after they were shipped. 
Looked at judicially, there appeared to be no right side 
to the matter, nor any right side possible in so thoroughly 
vicious a system as that of the American mercantile 
marine. The Consul could do little, except to take 
depositions, hold forth the greasy Testament to be pro- 
faned anew with perjured kisses, and, in a few instances 
of murder or manslaughter, carry the case before an Eng- 
lish magistrate, who generally decided that the evidence 
was too contradictory to authorize the transmission of the 
accused for trial in America. The newspapers all over 
England contained paragraphs, inveighing against the 
cruelties of American shipmasters. The British Parlia- 
ment took up the matter, (for nobody is so humane as 
John Bull, when his benevolent propensities are to be 
gratified by finding fault with his neighbor,) and caused 
Lord John Russell to remonstrate with our Government 
on the outrages for which it was responsible before the 
world, and which it failed to prevent or punish. The 
American Secretary of State, old General Cass, responded, 
with perfectly astounding ignorance of the subject, to the 
effect that the statements of outrages had probably been 
exaggerated, that the present laws of the United States 



40 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

were quite adequate to deal with them, and that the in- 
terference of the British Minister was uncalled for. 

The truth is, that the state of affairs was really very 
horrible, and could be met by no laws at that time (or I 
presume now) in existence. I once thought of writing a 
pamphlet on the subject, but quitted the Consulate before 
finding time to effect my purpose ; and all that phase of 
my life immediately assumed so dreamlike a consistency 
that I despaired of making it seem solid or tangible to 
the public. And now it looks distant and dim, like 
troubles of a century ago. The origin of the evil lay in 
the character of the seamen, scarcely any of whom were 
American, but the offscourings and refuse of all the 
seaports of the world, such stuff as piracy is made of, 
together with a considerable intermixture of returning 
emigrants, and a sprinkling of absolutely kidnapped 
American citizens. Even with such material, the ships 
were very inadequately manned. The shipmaster found 
himself upon the deep, with a vast responsibility of prop- 
erty and human life upon his hands, and no means of 
salvation except by compelling his inefficient and demor- 
alized crew to heavier exertions than could reasonably 
be required of the same number of able seamen. By 
law he had been intrusted with no discretion of judicious 
punishment ; he therefore habitually left the whole mat- 
ter of discipline to his irresponsible mates, men often of 
scarcely a superior quality to the crew. Hence ensued a 
great mass of petty outrages, unjustifiable assaults, shame- 
ful indignities, aTid nameless cruelty, demoralizing alike 
to the perpetrators and the sufferers ; these enormities 
fell into the ocean between the two countries, and could 
be punished in neither. Many miserable stories come 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 41 

back upon my memory as I write ; wrongs that were 
immense, but for which nobody could be held responsible, 
and which, indeed, the closer you looked into them, the 
more they lost the aspect of wilful misdoing and assumed 
that of an inevitable calamity. It was the fault of a sys- 
tem, the misfortune of an individual. Be that as it may, 
however, there will be no possibility of dealing effectually 
with these troubles as long as we deem it inconsistent 
with our national dignity or interests to allow the Eng- 
lish courts, under such restrictions as may seem fit, a 
jurisdiction over offences perpetrated on board our ves- 
sels in mid-ocean. 

In such a life as this, the American shipmaster devel- 
ops himself into a man of iron energies, dauntless cour- 
age, and inexhaustible resource, at the expense, it must 
be acknowledged, of some of the higher and gentler 
traits which might do him excellent service in maintain- 
ing his authority. The class has deteriorated of late 
years on account of the narrower field of selection, owing 
chiefly to the diminution of that excellent body of respect- 
ably educated New England seamen, from the flower of 
whom the officers used -to be recruited. Yet I found them, 
in many cases, very agreeable and intelligent companions, 
with less nonsense, about them than landsmen usually 
have, eschewers of fine-spun theories, delighting in square 
and tangible ideas, but occasionally infested with preju- 
dices that stuck to their brains like barnacles to a ship's 
bottom. I never could flatter myself that I was a gen- 
eral favorite with them. One or two, perhaps, even now, 
would scarcely meet me on amicable terms. Endowed 
universally with a great pertinacity of will, they es- 
pecially disliked the interference of a consul with their 



42 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

management on shipboard ; notwithstanding which I 
thrust in my very limited authority at every available 
opening, and did the utmost that lay in my power, though 
with lamentably small effect, towards enforcing a better 
kind of discipline. They thought, no doubt, (and on 
plausible grounds enough, but scarcely appreciating just 
that one little grain of hard New England sense, oddly 
thrown in among the flimsier composition of the Consul's 
character,) that he, a landsman, a bookman, and, as 
people said of him, a fanciful recluse, could not possibly 
understand anything of the difficulties or the necessities 
of a shipmaster's position. But their cold regards were 
rather acceptable than otherwise, for it is exceedingly 
awkward to assume a judicial austerity in the morning 
towards a man with whom you have been hobnobbing 
over night. 

With the technical details of the business of that great 
Consulate, (for great it then was, though now, I fear, 
wofully fallen off, and perhaps never to be revived in 
anything like its former extent,) I did not much interfere. 
They could safely be left to the treatment of two as faith- 
ful, upright, and competent subordinates, both English- 
men, as ever a man was fortunate enough to meet with, 
in a line of life altogether new and strange to him. I had 
come over with instructions to supply both their places 
with Americans, but, possessing a happy faculty of know- 
ing my own interest and the public's, I quietly kept hold 
of them, being little inclined to open the consular doors to 
a spy of the State Department or an intriguer for my own 
office. The venerable Vice-Consul Mr. Pearce, had wit- 
nessed the successive arrivals of a score of newly appointed 
Consuls, shadowy and short-lived dignitaries, and carried 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 43 

his reminiscences back to the epoch of Consul Maury, who 
was appointed by Washington, and has acquired almost 
the grandeur of a mythical personage in the annals of the 
Consulate. The principal clerk, Mr. Wilding, who lias 
since succeeded to the Vice-Consulship, was a man of 
English integrity — not that the English are more honest 
than ourselves, but only there is a certain sturdy reliable- 
ness common among them, which we do not quite so 
invariably manifest in just these subordinate positions — 
of English integrity, combined with American acuteness 
of intellect, quick-wittedness, and diversity of talent. It 
seemed an immense pity that he should wear out his life 
at a desk, without a step in advance from year's end to 
year's end, when, had it been his luck to be born on our 
side of the water, his bright faculties and clear probity 
would have insured him eminent success in whatever 
path he might adopt. Meanwhile, it would have been a 
sore mischance to me, had any better fortune on his part 
deprived me of Mr. Wilding's services. 

A fair amount of common sense, some acquaintance with 
the United States Statutes, an insight into character, a tact 
of management, a general knowledge of the world, and a 
reasonable but not too inveterately decided preference for 
his own will and judgment over those of interested people, 
— these natural attributes and moderate acquirements 
will enable a consul to perform many of his duties 
respectably, but not to dispense with a great variety of 
other qualifications, only attainable by long experience. 
Yet, I think, few consuls are so well accomplished. An 
appointment of whatever grade, in the diplomatic or con- 
sular service of America, is too often what the English 
call a "job"; that is to say, it is made on private and 



44 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

personal grounds, without a paramount eye to the public 
good or the gentleman's especial fitness for the position. 
It is not too much to say, (of course allowing for a brill- 
iant exception here and there,) that an American never 
is thoroughly qualified for a foreign post, nor has time to 
make himself so, before the revolution of the political 
wheel discards him from his office. Our country wrongs 
itself by permitting such a system of unsuitable ap- 
pointments, and, still more, of removals for no cause, just 
when the incumbent might be beginning to ripen into 
usefulness. Mere ignorance of official detail is of com- 
paratively small moment ; though it is considered indis- 
pensable, I presume, that a man in any private capacity 
shall be thoroughly acquainted with the machinery and 
operation of his business, and shall not necessarily lose 
his position on having attained such knowledge. But 
there are so many more important things to be thought 
of, in the qualifications of a foreign resident, that his 
technical dexterity or clumsiness is hardly worth men- 
tioning. 

One great part of a consul's duty, for example, should 
consist in building up for himself a recognized position in 
the society where he resides, so that his local influence 
might be felt in behalf of his own country, and, so far as 
they are compatible (as they generally are to the utmost 
extent) for the interests of both nations. The foreign 
city should know that it has a permanent inhabitant and 
a hearty well-wisher in him. There are many conjunc- 
tures (and one of them is now upon us) where a long- 
established, honored, and trusted American citizen, hold- 
ing a public position under our Government in such a 
town as Liverpool, might go far towards swaying and 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 45 

directing the sympathies of the inhabitants. He might 
throw his own weight into the balance against mischief- 
makers ; lie might have set his foot on the first little 
spark of malignant purpose, which the next wind may 
blow into a national war. But we wilfully give up all 
advantages of this kind. The position is totally beyond 
the attainment of an American ; there to-day, bristling all 
over with the porcupine quills of our Republic, and gone 
to-morrow, just as he is becoming sensible of the broader 
and more generous patriotism which might almost amal- 
gamate with that of England, without losing an atom of 
its native force and flavor. In the changes that appear 
to await us, and some of which, at least, can hardly fail 
to be for good, let us hope for a reform in this matter. 

For myself, as the gentle reader would spare me the 
trouble of saying, I was not at all the kind of man to 
grow into such an ideal Consul as I have here suggested. 
I never in my life desired to be burdened with public 
influence. I disliked my office from the first, and never 
came into any good accordance with it. Its dignity, so 
far as it had any, was an incumbrance ; the attentions it 
drew upon me (such as invitations to Mayor's banquets 
and public celebrations of all kinds, where, to my horror, 
I found myself expected to stand up and speak) were — as 
I may say, without incivility or ingratitude, because there 
is nothing personal in that sort of hospitality — a bore. 
The official business was irksome,, and often painful. 
There was nothing pleasant about the whole affair except 
the emoluments ; and even those, never too bountifully 
reaped, were diminished by more than half in the second 
or third year of my incumbency. All this being true, I 
was quite prepared, in advance of the inauguration of 



46 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

Mr. Buchanan, to send in my resignation. Wlien my 
successor arrived, I drew the long, delightful breath which 
first made me thoroughly sensible what an unnatural life I 
had been leading, and compelled me to admire myself for 
having battled with it so sturdily. The new-comer proved 
to be a very genial and agreeable gentleman, an F. F. V., 
and, as he pleasantly acknowledged, a Southern Fire- 
Eater, — an announcement to which I responded, with 
similar good-humor and self-complacency, by parading my 
descent from an ancient line of Massachusetts Puritans. 
Since our brief acquaintanceship, my fire-eating friend has 
had ample opportunities to banquet on his favorite diet, hot 
and hot, in the Confederate service. For myself, as soon 
as I was out of office, the retrospect began to look unreal. 
I could scarcely believe that it was I, — that figure whom 
they called a Consul — but a sort of Double Ganger, who 
had been permitted to assume my aspect, under which he 
went through his shadowy duties with a tolerable show 
of efficiency, while my real self had lain, as regarded my 
proper mode of being and acting, in a state of suspended 
animation. 

The same sense of illusion still pursues me. There is 
some mistake in this matter. I have been writing about 
another man's consular experiences, with which, through 
some mysterious medium of transmitted ideas, I find my- 
self intimately acquainted, but in which I cannot possibly 
have had a personal interest. Is it not a dream alto- 
gether ? The figure of that poor Doctor of Divinity looks 
wonderfully lifelike ; so do those of the Oriental adven- 
turer with the visionary coronet above his brow, and the 
moonstruck visitor of the Queen, and the poor old wan- 
derer, seeking his native country through English high- 



CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 47 

ways and by-ways for almost thirty years ; and so would 
a hundred others that I might summon up with similar 
distinctness. But were they more than shadows ? 
Surely, I think not. Nor are these present pages a 
bit of intrusive autobiography. Let not the reader 
wrong me by supposing it. I never should have written 
with half such unreserve, had it been a portion of this 
life congenial with my nature, which I am living now, 
instead of a series of incidents and characters entirely 
apart from my own concerns, and on which the qualities 
personally proper to me could have had no bearing. 
Almost the only real incidents, as I see them now, were 
the visits of a young English friend, a scholar and a liter- 
ary amateur, between whom and myself there sprung up an 
affectionate, and, I trust, not transitory regard. He used 
to come and sit or stand by my fireside, talking viva- 
ciously and eloquently with me about literature and life, 
his own national characteristics and mine, with such 
kindly endurance of the many rough republicanisms 
wherewith I assailed him, and such frank and amiable 
assertion of all sorts of English prejudices and mistakes, 
that I understood his countrymen infinitely the better for 
him, and was almost prepared to love the intensest Eng- 
lishman of them all, for his sake. It w r ould gratify my 
cherished remembrance of this dear friend, if I could 
manage, without offending him, or letting the public know 
jt. to introduce his name upon my page. Bright was 
tin- illumination of my dusky little apartment, as often as 
he made his appearance there ! 

The English sketches which I have been offering to 
the public, comprise a few of the more external and 
therefore more readily manageable things that I took 



48 CONSULAR EXPERIENCES. 

note of, in many escapes from the imprisonment of my 
consular servitude. Liverpool, though not very delight- 
ful as a place of residence, is a most convenient and 
admirable point to get away from. London is only five 
hours off by the fast train. Chester, the most curious 
town in England, with its encompassing wall, its ancient 
rows, and its venerable cathedral, is close at hand. 
North Wales, with all its hills and ponds, its noble sea- 
scenery, its multitude of gray castles and strange old 
villages, may be glanced at in a summer day or two. 
The lakes and mountains of Cumberland and Westmore- 
land may be reached beTore dinner-time. The haunted 
and legendary Isle of Man, a little kingdom by itself, lies 
within the scope of an afternoon's voyage. Edinburgh or 
Glasgow are attainable over-night, and Loch Lomond 
betimes in the morning. Visiting these famous localities, 
and a great many others, I hope that I do not compro- 
mise my American patriotism by acknowledging that I 
was often conscious of a fervent hereditary attachment to 
the native soil of our forefathers, and felt it to be our 
own Old Home. 



LEAMINGTON SPA. 

In the course of several visits and stays of considerable 
length we acquired a homelike feeling towards Leaming- 
ton, and came back thither again and again, chiefly be- 
cause we had been there before. Wandering and wayside 
people, such as we had long since become, retain a few 
of the instincts that belong to a more settled way of 
life, and often prefer familiar and commonplace objects 
(for the very reason that they are so) to the dreary 
strangeness of scenes that might be thought much better 
worth the seeing. There is a small nest of a place in 
Leamington — at No. 10, Lansdowne Circus — upon 
which, to this day, my reminiscences are apt to settle as 
one of the coziest nooks in England or in the world ; not 
that it had any special charm of its own, but only that 
we stayed long enough to know it well, and even to grow 
a little tired of it. In my opinion, the very tediousness of 
home and friends makes a part of what we love them for ; 
if it be not mixed in sufficiently with the other elements 
of life, there may be mad enjo} r ment, but no happiness. 

The modest abode to which I have alluded forms one 
of a circular range of pretty, moderate-sized, two-story 
houses, all built on nearly the same plan, and each pro- 
vided with its little grass-plot, its flowers, its tufts of box 
trimmed into globes and other fantastic shapes, and its 
4 



50 LEAMINGTON SPA. 

verdant hedges shutting the house in from the common 
drive and dividing it from its equally cozy neighbors. 
Coming out of the door, and taking a turn round the 
circle of sister-dwellings, it is difficult to find your way 
back by any distinguishing individuality of your own 
habitation. In the centre of the Circus is a space fenced 
in with iron railing, a small play -place and sylvan retreat 
for the children of the precinct, permeated by brief paths 
through the fresh English grass, and shadowed by vari- 
ous shrubbery ; amid which, if you like, you may fancy 
yourself in a deep seclusion, though probably the mark of 
eye-shot from the windows of all the surrounding houses. 
But, in truth, with regard to the rest of the town and the 
world at large, an abode here is a genuine seclusion ; for 
the ordinary stream of life does not run through this little, 
quiet pool, and few or none of the inhabitants seem to be 
troubled with any business or outside activities. I used 
to set them down as half-pay officers, dowagers of narrow 
income, elderly maiden ladies, and other people of re- 
spectability, but small account, such as hang on the 
world's skirts rather than actually belong to it. The 
quiet of the place was seldom disturbed, except by the 
grocer and butcher, who came to receive orders, or by 
the cabs, hackney-coaches, and Bath-chairs, in which the 
ladies took an infrequent airing, or the livery-steed which 
the retired captain sometimes bestrode for a morning ride, 
or by the red-coated postman who went his rounds twice 
a day to deliver letters, and again in the evening, ringing 
a hand-bell, to take letters for the mail. In merely men- 
tioning these slight interruptions of its sluggish stillness, 
I seem to myself to disturb too much the atmosphere of 
quiet that brooded over the spot; whereas its impression 



LEAMINGTON SPA. 51 

upon me was, that the world had never found the way 
hither, or had forgotten it, and that the fortunate inhab- 
itants were the only ones who possessed the spell- word 
of admittance. Nothing could have suited me better, at 
the time ; for I had been holding a position of public ser- 
vitude, which imposed upon me (among a great many 
lighter duties) the ponderous necessity of being univer- 
sally civil and sociable. 

Nevertheless, if a man were seeking the bustle of 
society, he might find it more readily in Leamington than 
in most other English towns. It is a permanent water- 
ing-place, a sort of institution to which I do not know any 
close parallel in American life c for such places as Sara- 
toga bloom only for the summer season, and offer a thou- 
sand dissimilitudes even then ; while Leamington seems 
to be always in flower, and serves as a home to the 
homeless all the year round. Its original nucleus, the 
plausible excuse for the town's coming into prosperous 
existence, lies in the fiction of a chalybeate well, which, 
indeed, is so far a reality that out of its magical depths 
have gushed streets, groves, gardens, mansions, shops, 
and churches, and spread themselves along the banks of 
the little river Learn. This miracle accomplished, the 
beneficent fountain has retired beneath a pump-room, and 
appears to have given up all pretensions to the remedial 
virtues formerly attributed to it. I know not whether its 
waters are ever tasted nowadays ; but not the less does 
Leamington — in pleasant Warwickshire, at the very 
midmost point of England, in a good hunting neighbor- 
hood, and surrounded by country-seats and castles — con- 
tinue to be a resort of transient visitors, and the more 
permanent abode of a class of genteel, unoccupied, well- 



52 LEAMINGTON SPA. 

to-do, but not very wealthy people, such as are hardly 
known among ourselves. Persons who have no country- 
houses, and whose fortunes are inadequate to a London 
expenditure, find here, I suppose, a sort of town and 
country life in one. 

In its present aspect the town is of no great age. In 
contrast with the antiquity of many places in its neigh- 
borhood, it has a bright, new face, and seems almost to 
smile even amid the sombreness of an English autumn. 
Nevertheless, it is hundreds upon hundreds of years old, 
if we reckon up that sleepy lapse of time during which it 
existed as a small village of thatched houses, clustered 
round a priory ; and it would still have been precisely 
such a rural village, but for a certain Doctor Jephson, 
who lived within the memory of man, and who found out 
the magic well, and foresaw what fairy wealth might be 
made to flow from it. A public garden has been laid out 
along the margin of the Learn, and called the Jephson 
Garden, in honor of him who created the prosperity of 
his native spot. A little way within the garden-gate 
there is a circular temple of Grecian architecture, be- 
neath the dome of which stands a marble statue of the 
good Doctor, very well executed, and representing him 
with a face of fussy activity and benevolence : just the 
kind of man, if luck favored him, to build up the for- 
tunes of those about him, or, quite as probably, to blight 
his whole neighborhood by some disastrous speculation. 

The Jephson Garden is very beautiful, like most other 
English pleasure-grounds ; for, aided by their moist cli- 
mate and not too fervid sun, the landscape-gardeners 
excel in converting flat or tame surfaces into attractive 
scenery, chiefly through the skilful arrangement of trees 



LEAMINGTON SPA. 53 

and shrubbery. An Englishman aims at this effect even 
in the little patches under the windows of a suburban 
villa, and achieves it on a larger scale in a tract of many 
acres. The Garden is shadowed with trees of a fine 
growth, standing alone, or in dusky groves and dense 
entanglements, pervaded by woodland paths ; and emerg- 
ing from these pleasant glooms, we come upon a breadth 
of sunshine, where the green sward — so vividly green 
that it has a kind of lustre in it — is spotted with beds 
of gemlike flowers. Rustic chairs and benches are scat- 
tered about, some of them ponderously fashioned out of 
the stumps of obtruncated trees, and others more artfully 
made with intertwining branches, or perhaps an imitation 
of such frail handiwork in iron. In a central part of the 
Garden is an archery-ground, where laughing maidens 
practise at the butts, generally missing their ostensible 
mark, but, by the mere grace of their action, sending an 
unseen shaft into some young man's heart. There is 
space, moreover, within these precincts, for an artificial 
lake, with a little green island in the midst of it ; both 
lake and island being the haunt of swans, whose aspect 
and movement in the water are most beautiful and 
stately, — most infirm, disjointed, and decrepit, when, 
unadvisedly, they see fit to emerge, and try to walk upon 
dry land. In the latter case, they look like a breed of 
uncommonly ill-contrived geese ; and I record the matter 
here for the sake of the moral, — that we should never 
pass judgment on the merits of any person or thing, unless 
we behold them in the sphere and circumstances to which 
they are specially adapted. In still another part of the 
Garden there is a labyrinthine maze, formed of an intri- 
cacy of hedge-bordered walks, involving himself in which, 



54 LEAMINGTON SPA. 

a man might wander for hours inextricably within a circuit 
of only a few yards. It seemed to me a sad emblem of 
the mental and moral perplexities in which we sometimes 
go astray, petty in scope, yet large enough to entangle a 
lifetime, and bewilder us with a weary movement, but no 
genuine progress. 

The Learn — the " high complectioned Learn," as 
Drayton calls it — after drowsing across the principal 
street of the town beneath a handsome bridge, skirts 
along the margin of the Garden without any perceptible 
flow. Heretofore I had fancied the Concord the laziest 
river in the world, but now assign that amiable distinc- 
tion to the little English stream. Its water is by no 
means transparent, but has a greenish, goose-puddly hue, 
which, however, accords well with the other coloring and 
characteristics of the scene, and is disagreeable neither to 
sight nor smell. Certainly, this river is a perfect feature 
of that gentle picturesqueness in which England is so 
rich, sleeping, as it does, beneath a margin of willows 
that droop into its bosom, and other trees, of deeper ver- 
dure than our own country can boast, inclining lovingly 
over it. On the Garden-side it is bordered by a shadowy, 
secluded grove, with winding paths among its boskiness, 
affording many a peep at the river's imperceptible lapse 
and tranquil gleam ; and on the opposite shore stands the 
priory-church, with its churchyard full of shrubbery and 
tombstones. 

The business portion of the town clusters about the 
banks of the Learn, and is naturally densest around the 
well to which the modern settlement owes its existence. 
Here are the commercial inns, the post-office, the furni- 
ture dealers, the ironmongers, and all the heavy and 



LEAMINGTON SPA. 55 

homely establishments that connect themselves even with 
the airiest modes of human life ; while upward from the 
river, by a long and gentle ascent, rises the principal 
street, which is very bright and cheerful in its physiog- 
nomy, and adorned with shop-fronts almost as splendid as 
those of London, though on a diminutive scale. There 
are likewise side-streets and cross-streets, many of which 
are bordered with the beautiful Warwickshire elm, a 
most unusual kind of adornment for an English town ; 
and spacious avenues, wide enough to afford room for 
stately groves, with foot-paths running beneath the lofty 
shade, and rooks cawing and chattering so high in the 
tree-tops that their voices get musical before reaching the 
earth. The houses are mostly built in blocks and ranges, 
in which every separate tenement is a repetition of its 
fellow, though the architecture of the different ranges is 
sufficiently various. Some of them are almost palatial 
in size and sumptuqusness of arrangement. Then, on 
the outskirts of the town, there are detached villas, en- 
closed within that separate domain of high stone fence 
and embowered shrubbery which an Englishman so loves 
to build and plant around his abode, presenting to the 
public only an iron gate, with a gravelled carriage-drive 
winding away towards the half-hidden mansion. Wheth- 
er in street or suburb, Leamington may fairly be called 
beautiful, and, at some points, magnificent ; but by and 
by you become doubtfully suspicious of a somewhat unreal 
finery : it is pretentious, though not glaringly so ; it has 
been built, with malice aforethought, as a place of gentil- 
ity and enjoyment. Moreover, splendid as the houses 
look, and comfortable as they often are, there is a name- 
less something about them, betokening that they have not 



56 LEAMINGTON SPA. 

grown out of human hearts, but are the creations of a 
skilfully applied human intellect : no man has reared any- 
one of them, whether stately or humble, to be his life- 
long residence, wherein to bring up his children, who are 
to inherit it as, a home. They are nicely contrived lodging- 
houses, one and all, — the best as well as the shabbiest 
of them, — and therefore inevitably lack some nameless 
property that a home should have. This was the case 
with our own little snuggery in Lansdowne Circus, as 
with all the rest ; it had not grown out of anybody's in- 
dividual need, but was built to let or sell, and was there- 
fore like a ready-made garment, — a tolerable fit, but 
only tolerable. 

All these blocks, ranges, and detached villas are 
adorned with the finest and most aristocratic names that 
I have found anywhere in England, except, perhaps, in 
Bath, which is the great metropolis of that second-class 
gentility with which watering-places are chiefly popu- 
lated. Lansdowne Crescent, Lansdowne Circus, Lans- 
downe Terrace, Regent Street, Warwick Street, Claren- 
don Street, the Upper and Lower Parade : such are a 
few of the designations. Parade, indeed, is a well-chosen 
name for the principal street, along which the population 
of the idle town draws itself out for daily review and dis- 
play. I only wish that my descriptive powers would 
enable me to throw off a picture of the scene at a sunny 
noontide, individualizing each character with a touch : 
the great people alighting from their carriages at the 
principal shop-doors ; the elderly ladies and infirm Indian 
officers drawn along in Bath-chairs ; the comely, rather 
than pretty, English girls, with their deep, healthy bloom, 
which an American taste is apt to deem fitter for a milk- 



LEAMINGTON SPA. 57 

maid than for a lady; the moustached gentlemen with 
frogged surtouts and a military air ; the nursemaids and 
chubby children, but no chubbier than our own, and 
scampering on slenderer legs ; the sturdy figure of John 
Bull in all varieties and of all ages, but ever with the 
stamp of authenticity somewhere about him. 

To say the truth, I have been holding the pen over my 
paper, purposing to write a descriptive paragraph or two 
about the throng on the principal Parade of Leamington, 
so arranging it as to present a sketch of the British out-of- 
door aspect on a morning walk of gentility ; but I find no 
personages quite sufficiently distinct and individual m my 
memory to supply the materials of such a panorama. 
Oddly enough, the only figure that comes fairly forth to 
my mind's eye is that of a dowager, one of hundreds 
whom I used to marvel at, all over England, but who 
have scarcely a representative among our own ladies of 
autumnal life, so thin, careworn, and frail, as age usually 
makes the latter. 

I have heard a good deal of the tenacity with which 
English ladies retain their personal beauty to a late 
period of life ; but (not to suggest that an American eye 
needs use and cultivation before it can quite^ippreciate 
the charm of English beauty at any age) it strikes me 
that an English lady of fifty is apt to become a creature 
less refined and delicate, so far as her physique goes, 
than anything that we Western people class under the 
name of woman. She has an awful ponderosity of frame, 
not pulpy, like the looser development of our few fat 
women, but massive with solid beef and streaky tallow ; 
so that (though struggling manfully against the idea) you 
inevitably think of her as made up of steaks and sirloins. 



58 LEAMINGTON SPA. 

When she walks, her advance is elephantine. When she 
sits down, it is on a great round space of her Maker's 
^footstool, where she looks as if nothing could ever move 
her. She imposes awe and respect by the muchness of 
her personality, to such a degree that you probably credit 
her with far greater moral and intellectual force than she 
can fairly claim. Her visage is usually grim and stern, 
seldom positively forbidding, yet calmly terrible, not 
merely by its breadth and weight of feature, but because it 
seems to express so much well-founded self-reliance, such 
acquaintance with the world, its toils, troubles, and dan- 
gers,*and such sturdy capacity for trampling down a foe. 
Without anything positively salient, or actively offensive, 
or, indeed, unjustly formidable to her neighbors, she has 
the effect of a seventy-four gun-ship in time of peace ; 
for, while you assure yourself that there is no real dan- 
ger, you cannot help thinking how tremendous would be 
her onset, if pugnaciously inclined, and how futile the 
effort to inflict any counter-injury. She certainly looks 
tenfold — nay, a hundred-fold — better able to take care of 
herself than our slender-framed and haggard womankind ; 
but I have not found reason to suppose that the English 
dowager of fifty has actually greater courage, fortitude, 
and strength of character than our women of similar age, 
or even a tougher physical endurance than they. Mor- 
ally, she is strong, I suspect, only in society, and in the 
common routine of social affairs, and would be found 
powerless and timid in any exceptional strait that might 
call for energy outside of the conventionalities amid 
which she has grown up. 

You can meet this figure in the street, and live, # and 
even smile at the recollection. But conceive of her in a 



LEAMINGTON SPA. 59 

ball-room, with the bare, brawny arms that she invariably 
displays there, and all the other corresponding develop- 
ment, such as is beautiful in the maiden blossom, but a 
spectacle to howl at in such an over-blown cabbage-rose 
as this. 

Yet, somewhere in this enormous bulk there must be 
hidden the modest, slender, violet-nature of a girl, whom 
an alien mass of earthliness has unkindly overgrown ; for 
an English maiden in her teens, though very seldom so 
pretty as our own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, 
a certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately folded 
leaves, and tender womanhood shielded by maidenly 
reserves, with which, somehow or other, our American 
girls often fail to adorn themselves during an appreciable 
moment. It is a pity that the English violet should grow 
into such an outrageously 'developed peony as I have 
attempted to describe. I wonder whether a middle-aged 
husband ought to be considered as legally married to all 
the accretions that have overgrown the slenderness of his 
bride, since he led her to the altar, and which make her 
so much more than he ever bargained for ! Is it not a 
sounder view of the case, that the matrimonial bond can- 
not be held to include the three fourths of the wife that 
had no existence when the ceremony was performed? 
And as a matter of conscience and good morals, ought 
not an English married pair to insist upon the celebra- 
tion of a Silver Wedding at the end of twenty-five years, 
in order to legalize and mutually appropriate that cor- 
poreal growth of which both parties have individually 
come into possession since they were pronounced one 
flesh ? 

The chief enjoyment of my several visits to Learning- 



60 LEAMINGTON SPA. 

ton lay in rural walks about the neighborhood, and in 
jaunts to places of note and interest, which are particu- 
larly abundant in that region. The high-roads are made 
pleasant to the traveller by a border of trees, and often 
afford him the hospitality of a wayside bench beneath a 
comfortable shade. But a fresher delight is to be found 
in the foot-paths, which go wandering away from style to 
style, along hedges, and across broad fields, and through 
wooded parks, leading you to little hamlets of thatched 
cottages, ancient, solitary farm-houses, picturesque old 
mills, streamlets, pools, and all those quiet, secret, unex- 
pected, yet strangely familiar features of English scenery 
that Tennyson shows us in his idyls and eclogues. These 
bypaths admit the wayfarer into the very heart of rural 
life, and yet do not burden him with a sense of intrusive* 
ness. He has a right to go whithersoever they lead him ; 
for, with all their shaded privacy, they are as much the 
property of the public as the dusty high-road itself, and 
even by an older tenure. Their antiquity j>robably ex- 
ceeds that of the Roman ways ; the footsteps of the 
aboriginal Britons first wore away the grass, and the 
natural flow of intercourse between village and village 
has kept the track bare ever since. An American 
farmer would plough across any such path, and obliter- 
ate it with his hills of potatoes and Indian corn ; but 
here it is protected by law, and still more by the sacred- 
ness that inevitably springs up, in this soil, along the 
well-defined footprints of centuries. Old associations 
are sure to be fragrant herbs in English nostrils : we 
pull them up as weeds. 

I remember such a path, the* access to which is from 
Lovers' Grove, a range of tall old oaks and elms on a 



LEAMINGTON SPA. 61 

high hill-top, whence there is a view of "Warwick Castle. 
and a wide extent of landscape, beautiful, though be- 
dimmed with English 'mist. This particular foot-path, 
however, is not a remarkably good specimen of its kind, 
since it leads into no hollows and seclusions, and soon 
terminates in a high road. It connects Leamington by a 
short cut with the small neighboring village of Lillington, . 
a place which impresses an American observer with its 
many points of contrast to the rural aspects of his own 
country. The village consists chiefly of one row of con- 
tiguous dwellings, separated only by party-walls, but ill- 
matched among themselves, being of different heights, 
and apparently of various ages, though all are of an an- 
tiquity which we should call venerable. Some of the 
windows are leaden-framed lattices, opening on hinges. 
These^ houses are mostly built of gray stone; but others, 
in the same range, are of brick, and one or two are in a 
very old fashion, — Elizabethan, or still older, — having 
a ponderous framework of oak, painted black, and tilled 
in with plastered stone or bricks. Judging by the patches 
of repair, the oak seems to be the more durable part of 
the structure. Some of the roofs are covered with earth- 
em tiles ; others (more decayed and poverty-stricken) 
with thatch, out of which sprouts a luxurious vegetation 
of grass, house-leeks, and yellow flowers. What es- 
pecially strikes an American is the lack of that insulated 
space, the intervening gardens, grass-plots, orchards, 
broad-spreading shade-trees, which occur between our 
own village-houses. These English dwellings have no 
such separate surroundings ; they all grow together, like 
the cells of a honey-comb. 

Beyond the first row of houses, and hidden from it by 



62 LEAMINGTON SPA. 

a turn of the road, there was another row (or block, as 
we should call it) of small old cottages, stuck one against 
another, with their thatched roofs forming a single con- 
tiguity. These, I presume, were the habitations of the 
poorest order of rustic laborers ; and the narrow precincts 
of each cottage, as well as the close neighborhood of the 
whole, gave the impression of a stifled, unhealthy atmos- 
phere among the occupants. It seemed impossible that 
there should be a cleanly reserve, a proper self-respect 
among individuals, or a wholesome unfamiliarity between 
families, where human life was crowded and massed into 
such intimate communities as these. Nevertheless, not 
to look beyond the outside, I never saw a prettier rural 
scene than was presented by this range of contiguous 
huts. For in front of the whole row was a luxuriant 
and well-trimmed hawthorn hedge, and belonging to each 
cottage was a little square of garden-ground, separated 
from its neighbors by a line of the same verdant fence. 
The gardens were chockfull, not of. esculent vegetables, 
but of flowers, familiar ones, but very bright-colored, and 
shrubs of box, some of which were trimmed into artistic 
shapes ; and I remember, before one door, a representa- 
tion of Warwick Castle, made of oyster-shells. The 
cottagers evidently loved the little nests in which they 
dwelt, and did their best to make them beautiful, and 
succeeded more than tolerably well, — so kindly did 
Nature help their humble efforts with its verdure, flow- 
ers, moss, lichens, and the green things that grew out of 
the thatch. Through some of the open doorways we 
saw plump children rolling about on the stone floors, and 
their mothers, by no means very pretty, but as happy- 
looking as mothers generally are ; and while we gazed at 



LEAMINGTON SPA. 63 

these domestic matters, an old woman rushed wildly out 
of one of the gates, upholding a shovel, on which she 
clanged and clattered.. with a key. At first we fancied 
that she intended an onslaught against ourselves, but soon 
discovered that a more dangerous enemy was abroad ; for 
the old lady's bees had swarmed, and the air was full of 
them, whizzing by our heads like bullets. 

Not far from these two rows of houses and cottages, a 
green lane, overshadowed with trees, turned aside from 
the main road, and tended towards a square, gray tower, 
the battlements of which were just high enough to be 
visible above the foliage. Wending our way thitherward, 
we found the very picture and ideal of a country church 
and churchyard. The tower seemed to be of Norman 
architecture, low, massive, and crowned with battlements. 
The body of the church was of very modest dimensions, 
and the eaves so low that I could touch them with my 
walking-stick. We looked into the windows and beheld 
the dim and quiet interior, a narrow space, but venerable 
with the consecration of many centuries, and keeping its 
sanctity as entire and inviolate as that of a vast cathedral. 
The nave was divided from the side aisles of the church 
by pointed arches resting on very sturdy pillars : it was 
good to see how solemnly they held themselves to their 
age-long task of supporting that lowly roof. There was 
a small organ, suited in size to the vaulted hollow, which 
it weekly filled with religious sound. On the opposite 
wall of the church, between two windows, was a mural 
tablet of white marble, with an inscription in black let- 
ters, — the only such memorial that I could discern, 
although many dead people doubtless lay beneath the 
floor, and had paved it with their ancient tombstones, as 



64 LEAMINGTON SPA. 

is customary in old English churches. There were no 
modern painted windows, flaring with raw colors, nor 
other gorgeous adornments, such as the present taste for 
mediaeval restoration often patches upon the decorous 
simplicity of the gray village-church. It is probably the 
worshipping-place of no more distinguished a congrega- 
tion than the farmers and peasantry who inhabit the 
houses and cottages which I have just described. Had 
the lord of the manor been one of the parishioners, there 
would have been an eminent pew near the chancel, walled 
high about, curtained, and softly cushioned, warmed by a 
fireplace of its own, and distinguished by hereditary tab- 
lets and escutcheons on the enclosed stone pillar. 

A well-trodden path led across the churchyard, and 
the gate being on the latch, we entered, and walked round 
among the graves and monuments. The latter were 
chiefly head-stones, none of which were very old, so far 
as was discoverable by the dates ; some, indeed, in so 
ancient a cemetery, were disagreeably new, with inscrip- 
tions glittering like sunshine, in gold letters. The ground 
must have been dug over and over again, innumerable 
times, until the soil is made up of what was once human 
clay, out of which have sprung successive crops of grave- 
stones, that flourish their allotted time, and disappear, 
like the weeds and flowers in their briefer period. The 
English climate is very unfavorable to the endurance of 
memorials in the open air. Twenty years of it suffice 
to give as much antiquity of aspect, whether to tombstone 
or edifice, as a hundred years of our own drier atmos- 
phere, — so soon do the drizzly rains and constant mois- 
ture corrode the surface of marble or freestone. Sculp- 
tured edges lose their sharpness in a year or two ; yellow 



LEAMINGTON SPA. G5 

lichens overspread a beloved name, and obliterate it while 
it is yet fresh upon some survivors heart. Time gnaws 
an English gravestone with wonderful appetite ; and 
when the inscription is quite illegible, the sexton takes 
the useless slab away, and perhaps makes a hearthstone 
of it, and digs up the unripe bones which it ineffectually 
tried to memorialize, and gives the bed to another sleeper. 
Li the Charter-Street burial-ground at Salem, and in the 
old graveyard on the hill at Ipswich, I have seen more 
ancient gravestones, with legible inscriptions on them, 
than in any English churchyard. 

And yet this same ungenial climate, hostile as it gen- 
erally is to the long remembrance of departed people, has 
sometimes a lovely way of dealing with the records on 
certain monuments that lie horizontally in the open air. 
The rain falls into the deep incisions of the letters, and 
has scarcely time to be dried away before another shower 
sprinkles the flat stone again, and replenishes those little 
reservoirs. The unseen, mysterious seeds of mosses find 
their way into the lettered furrows, and are made to ger- 
minate by the continual moisture and watery sunshme of 
the English sky ; and by and by, in a year, or two years, 
or many years, behold the complete inscription — 

and all the rest of the tender falsehood — beautifully 
embossed in raised letters of living green, a bas-relief 
of veh-et moss on the marble slab ! It becomes more 
legible, under the skyey influences, after the world has 
forgotten the deceased, than when it was fresh from the 
stone-cutter's hands. It outlives the grief of friends. 
I first saw an example of this in Bebbington church- 
5 



66 LEAMINGTON SPA. 

yard, in Cheshire, and thought that Nature must needs 
have had a special tenderness for the person (no noted 
man, however, in the world's history) so long ago laid 
beneath that stone, since she took such wonderful pains 
to " keep his memory green." Perhaps the proverbial 
phrase just quoted may have had its origin in the natural 
phenomenon here described. 

While we rested ourselves on a horizontal monument, 
which was elevated just high enough to be a convenient 
seat, I observed that one of the gravestones lay very 
close to the church, — so close that the droppings of the 
eaves would fall upon it. It seemed as if the inmate of 
that grave had desired to creep under the church-wall. 
On closer inspection, we found an almost illegible epitaph 
on the stone, and with difficulty made out this forlorn 
verse : — 

" Poorly lived, 
And poorly died, 
Poorly buried, 
And no one cried." 

It would be hard to compress the story of a cold and 
luckless life, death, and burial into fewer words, or more 
impressive ones ; at least, we found them impressive, per- 
haps because we had to re-create the inscription by 
scraping away the lichens from the faintly traced letters. 
The grave was on the shady and damp side of the church, 
endwise towards it, the head-stone being within about 
three feet of the foundation-wall ; so that, unless the poor 
man was a dwarf, he must have been doubled up to 
fit him into his final resting-place. No wonder that his 
epitaph murmured against so poor a burial as this ! His 
name, as well as I could make it out, was Treeo, — John 



LEAMINGTON SPA. 67 

Treeo, I think, — and lie died in 1810, at the age of sev- 
enty-four. The gravestone is so overgrown with grass 
and weeds, so covered with unsightly lichens, and so 
crumbly with time and foul weather, that it is question- 
able whether anybody will ever be at the trouble of de- 
ciphering it again. But there is a quaint and sad kind 
of enjoyment in defeating (to such slight degree as my 
pen may do it) the probabilities of oblivion for poor John 
Treeo, and asking a little sympathy for him, half a cen- 
tury after his death, and making him better and more 
widely known, at least, than any other slumberer in Lil- 
lington churchyard : he having been, as appearances go, 
the outcast of them all. 

You find similar old churches and villages in all the 
neighboring country, at the distance of every two or three 
miles ; and I describe them, not as being rare, but be- 
cause they are so common and characteristic. The vil- 
lage of Whitnash, within twenty minutes' walk of Leam- 
ington, looks as secluded, as rural, and as little disturbed 
by the fashions of to-day, as if Dr. Jephson had never 
developed all those Parades and Crescents out of his 
magic well. I used to wonder whether the inhabitants 
had ever yet heard of railways, or, at their slow rate of 
progress, had even reached the epoch of stage-coaches. 
As you approach the village, while it is yet unseen, you 
observe a tall, overshadowing canopy of elm-tree tops, 
beneath which you almost hesitate to follow the public 
road, on account of the remoteness that seems to exist 
between the precincts of this old-world community and 
the thronged modern street out of which you have so 
recently emerged. Venturing onward, however, you 
soon find yourself in the heart of Whitnash, and see 



68 * LEAMINGTON SPA. 

an irregular ring of ancient rustic dwellings surrounding 
the village-green, on one side of which stands the church, 
with its square Noyman tower and battlements, while 
close adjoining is the vicarage, made picturesque by 
peaks and gables. At first glimpse, none of the houses 
appear to be less than two or three centuries old, and 
they are of the ancient, wooden-framed fashion, with 
thatched roofs, which give them the air of birds' nests, 
thereby assimilating them closely to the simplicity of 
Nature. 

The church-tower is mossy and much gnawed by time ; 
it has narrow loopholes up and down its front and sides, 
and an arched window over the low portal, set with small 
panes of glass, cracked, dim, and irregular, through which 
a bygone age is peeping out into the daylight. Some of 
those old, grotesque faces, called gargoyles, are seen on 
the projections of the architecture. The churchyard is 
very small, and is encompassed by a gray stone fence 
that looks as ancient as the church itself. In front of the 
tower, on the village-green, is a yew-tree of incalculable 
age, with a vast circumference of trunk, but a very scanty 
head of foliage ; though its boughs still keep some of the 
vitality which perhaps was in its early prime when the 
Saxon invaders founded Whitnash. A thousand years 
is no extraordinary antiquity in the lifetime of a yew. 
We were pleasantly startled, however, by discovering an 
exuberance of more youthful life than we had thought 
possible in so old a tree ; for the faces of two children 
laughed at us out of an opening in the trunk, which had 
become hollow with long decay. On one side of the 
yew stood a framework of worm-eaten timber, the use 
and meaning of which puzzled me exceedingly, till I 



LEAMINGTON SPA. * 69 

made it out to be the village-stocks : a public institution 
that, in its day, had doubtless hampered many a pair of 
shank-bones, now crumbling in the adjacent churchyard. 
It is not to be supposed, however, that this old-fashioned 
mode of punishment is still in vogue among the good 
people of Whitnash. The vicar of the parish has anti- 
quarian propensities, and had probably dragged the stocks 
out of some dusty hiding-place, and set them up on their 
former site as a curiosity. 

I disquiet myself in vain with the effort to hit upon 
some characteristic feature, or assemblage of features, that 
shall convey to the reader the influence of hoar antiquity 
lingering into the present daylight, as I so often felt it in 
these old English scenes. It is only an American who 
can feel it ; and even he begins to find himself growing 
insensible to its effect, after a long residence in England. 
But while you are still new in the old country, it thrills 
you with strange emotion to think that this little church of 
Whitnash, humble as it seems, stood for ages under the 
Catholic faith, and has not materially changed since Wiek- 
cliffe's days, and that it looked as gray as now in Bloody 
Mary's time, and that Cromwell's troopers broke off the 
stone noses of those same gargoyles that are now grinning 
in your face. So, too, with the immemorial yew-tree : you 
see its great roots grasping hold of the earth like gigantic 
claws, clinging so sturdily that no effort of time can 
wrench them away ; and there being life in the old tree, 
you feel all the more as if a contemporary witness were 
telling you of the things that have been. It has lived 
among men, and been a familiar object to them, and seen 
them brought to be christened and married and buried in 
the neighboring church and churchyard, through so many 



70 * LEAMINGTON SPA. 

centuries, that it knows all about our race, so far as fifty 
generations of the Whitnash people* can supply such 
knowledge. 

And, after all, what a weary life it must have been for 
the old tree ! Tedious beyond imagination ! Such, I 
think, is the final impression on the mind of an American 
visitor, when his delight at finding something permanent 
begins to yield to his Western love of change, and he 
becomes sensible of the heavy air of a spot where the 
forefathers and foremothers have grown up together, 
intermarried, and died, through a long succession of lives, 
without any intermixture of new elements, till family 
features and character are all run in the same inevitable 
mould. Life is there fossilized in its greenest leaf. The 
man who died yesterday or ever so long ago walks the 
village-street to-day, and chooses the same wife that he 
married a hundred years since, and must be buried again 
to-morrow under the same kindred dust that has already 
covered him half a score of times. The stone threshold 
of his cottage is worn away witlt his hob-nailed footsteps, 
shuffling over it from the reign of the first Plantagenet to 
that of Victoria. Better than this is the lot of our rest- 
less countrymen, whose modern instinct bids them tend 
always towards " fresh woods and pastures new." Rather 
than such monotony of sluggish ages, loitering on a vil- 
lage-green, toiling in hereditary fields, listening to the 
parson's drone lengthened through centuries in the gray 
Norman church, let us welcome whatever change may 
come, — change of place, social customs, political institu- 
tions, modes of worship, — trusting, that, if all present 
things shall vafrish, they will but make room for better 
systems, and for a higher type of man to clothe his life 
in them, and to fling them off in turn. 



LEAMINGTON SPA. 71 

Nevertheless, while an American willingly accepts 
growth and change as the law of his own national and 
private existence, he has a singular tenderness for the 
stone-incrusted institutions of the mother-country. The 
reason may be (though I should prefer a more generous 
explanation) that he recognizes the tendency of these 
hardened forms to stiffen her joints and fetter her ankles, 
in the race and rivalry of improvement. I hated to see 
so much as a twig of ivy wrenched away from an old 
wall in England. Yet change is at work, even in such a 
village as Whitnash. At a subsequent visit, looking more 
critically at the irregular circle of dwellings that surround 
the yew-tree and confront the church, I perceived that 
some of the houses must have been built within no long 
time, although the thatch, the quaint gables, and the old 
oaken framework of the others diffused an air of antiquity 
over the whole assemblage. The church itself was un- 
dergoing repair and restoration, which is but another 
name for change. Masons were making patch-work on 
the front of the tower, and were sawing a slab of stone 
and piling up bricks to strengthen the side-wall, or pos- 
sibly to enlarge the ancient edifice by an additional aisle. 
Moreover, they had dug an immense pit in the church- 
yard, long and broad, and fifteen feet deep, two thirds of 
which profundity were discolored by human decay, and 
mixed up with crumbly bones. What this excavation 
was intended for I could nowise imagine, unless it were 
the very pit in which Longfellow bids the " Dead Past 
bury its Dead," and Whitnash, of all places in the world, 
were going to avail itself of our poet's suggestion. If so, 
it must needs be confessed that many picturesque and 
delightful things would be thrown into the hole, and 
covered out of sight forever. 



72 LEAMINGTON SPA. 

The article which I am writing has taken its own 
course, and occupied itself almost wholly with country 
churches ; whereas I had purposed to attempt a descrip- 
tion of some of the many old towns — Warwick, Coven- 
try, Kenil worth, Stratford-on-Avon — which lie within 
an easy scope of Leamington. And still another church 
presents itself to my remembrance. It is that of Hatton, 
on which I stumbled in the course of a forenoon's ramble, 
and paused a little while to look at it for the sake of old 
Dr. Parr, who was once its vicar. Hatton, so far as I 
could discover, has no public-house, no shop, no con- 
tiguity of roofs, (as in most English villages, however 
small,) but is merely an ancient neighborhood of farm- 
houses, spacious, and standing wide apart, each within its 
own precincts, and offering a most comfortable aspect of 
orchards, harvest-fields, barns, stacks, and all manner of 
rural plenty. It seemed to be a community of old set- 
tlers, among whom everything had been going on prosper- 
ously since an epoch beyond the memory of man ; and 
they kept a certain privacy among themselves, and dwelt 
on a cross-road at the entrance of which was a barred- 
gate, hospitably open, but still impressing me with a sense 
of scarcely warrantable intrusion. After all, in some 
shady nook of those gentle Warwickshire slopes there 
may have been a denser and more populous settlement, 
styled Hatton, which I never reached. 

Emerging from the by-road, and entering upon one 
that crossed it at* right angles and led to Warwick, I 
espied the church of Dr. Parr. Like the others which I 
have described, it had a low stone tower, square, and 
battlement ed at its summit : for all these little churches 
seem to have been built on the same model, and nearly 



LEAMINGTON SPA. 73 

at the same measurement, and have even a greater 
family-likeness than the cathedrals. As I approached, 
the bell of the tower (a remarkably deep-toned bell, con- 
sidering how small it was) flung its voice abroad, and told 
me that it was noon. The church stands among its graves, 
a little removed from the wayside, quite apart from any 
collection of houses, and with no signs of a vicarage ; it 
is a good deal shadowed by trees, and not wholly desti- 
tute of ivy. The body of the edifice, unfortunately, (and 
it is an outrage which the English churchwardens are 
fond of perpetrating,) has been newly covered with a 
yellowish plaster or wash, so as quite to destroy the 
aspect of antiquity, except upon the tower, which wears 
the dark gray hue of many centuries. The chancel-win- 
dow is painted with a representation of Christ upon the 
Cross, and all the other windows are full of painted or 
stained glass, but none of it ancient, nor (if it be fair to 
judge from without of what ought to be seen within) 
possessing any of the tender glory that should be the 
inheritance of this branch of Art, revived from med- 
iaeval times. I stepped over the graves, and peeped 
in at two or three of the windows, and saw the snug 
interior of the church glimmering through the many- 
colored panes, like a show of commonplace objects 
under the fantastic influence of a dream : for the floor 
was covered with modern pews, very like what* we may 
see in a New England meeting-house, though, I think, a 
little more favorable than those would be to the quiet 
slumbers of the Hatton farmers and their families. Those 
who slept under Dr. Parr's preaching now prolong their 
nap, I suppose, in the churchyard round about, and can 
scarcely have drawn niuch spiritual benefit from any 



74 LEAMINGTON SPA. 

truths that he contrived to tell them in their lifetime. It 
struck me as a rare example (even where examples are 
numerous) of a man utterly misplaced, that this enormous 
scholar, great in the classic tongues, and inevitably con- 
verting his own simplest vernacular into a learned lan- 
guage, should have been set up in tins homely pulpit, 
and ordained to preach salvation to a rustic audience, to 
whom it is difficult to imagine how he could ever have 
spoken one available word. 

Almost ahvays, in visiting such scenes as I have been 
attempting to describe, I had a singular sense of having 
been there before. The ivy-grown English churches 
(even that of Bebbington, the first that I beheld) were 
quite as familiar to me, when fresh from home, as the 
old wooden meeting-house in Salem, w T hfch used, on 
wintry sabbaths, to be the frozen purgatory of my child- 
hood. This was a bewildering, yet very delightful emo- 
tion, fluttering about me like a faint summer-wind, and 
filling my imagination with a thousand half-remembran- 
ces, which looked as vivid as sunshine, at a side-glance, 
but faded quite away whenever I attempted to grasp and 
define them. Of course, the explanation of the mystery 
was, that history, poetry, and fiction, books of travel, and 
the talk of tourists, had given me pretty accurate precon- 
ceptions of the common objects of English scenery, and 
these, being long ago vivified by a youthful fancy, had 
insensibly taken their places among the images of things 
actually seen. Yet the illusion was often so powerful, 
that I almost doubted whether such airy remembrances 
might not be a sort of innate idea, the print of a recollec- 
tion in some ancestral mind, transmitted, with fainter and 
fainter impress through several descents, to my own. I 



LEAMINGTON SPA. 75 

felt, indeed, like the stalwart progenitor in person, return- 
ing to the hereditary haunts after more than two hundred 
years, and finding the church, the hall, the farm-house, 
the cottage, hardly changed during his long absence, — 
the same shady by-paths and hedge-lanes, the same veiled 
sky, and green lustre of the lawns and fields, — while Ins 
own affinities for these things, a little obscured by disuse, 
were reviving at every step. 

An American is not very apt to love the English peo- 
ple, as a whole, on whatever length of acquaintance. I 
fancy that they would value our regard, and even recip- 
rocate it in their ungracious way, if we could give it to 
them in spite of all rebuffs ; but they are beset by a curi- 
ous and inevitable infelicity, which compels them, as it 
were, to keep up what they seem to consider. a whole- 
some bitterness of feeling between themselves and all 
other nationalities, especially that of America. They 
will never confess it; nevertheless, it is as essential a 
tonic to them as their bitter ale. Therefore — and pos- 
sibly, too, from a similar narrowness in his own character 
— an American seldom feels quite as if he were at home 
among the English people. If he do so, he has ceased 
to be an American. But it requires no long residence to 
make him love their island, and appreciate it as thor- 
oughly as they themselves do. For my part, I jised to 
wish that we could annex it, transferring their thirty 
millions of inhabitants to some convenient wilderness in 
the great West, and putting half or a quarter as many of 
ourselves into their places. The change would be bene- 
ficial to both parties. We, in our dry atmosphere, are 
getting too nervous, haggard, dyspeptic, extenuated, un- 
substantial, theoretic, and need to be made grosser. John 



7G LEAMINGTON SPA. 

Bull, on the other hand, has grown bulbous, long-bodied, 
short-legged, heavy-witted, material, and, in a word, too 
intensely English. In a few more centuries he will be 
the earthliest creature that ever the earth saw. Hereto- 
fore Providence has obviated such a result by timely 
intermixtures of alien races with the old English stock ; 
so that each successive conquest of England has proved a 
victory by the revivification and improvement of its native 
manhood. Cannot America and England hit upon some 
scheme to secure even greater advantages to both nations ? 



7/ 



ABOUT WARWICK. 

Between bright, new Leamington, the growth of the 
present century, and rusty Warwick, founded by King 
Cymbeline in the twilight ages, a thousand years before 
the mediaeval darkness, there are two roads, either of 
which may be measured by a sober-paced pedestrian in 
less than half an hour. 

One of these avenues flows out of the midst of the 
smart parades and crescents of the former town, — along 
by hedges and beneath the shadow of great elms, past 
stuccoed Elizabethan villas and way-side ale-houses, and 
through a hamlet of modern aspect, — and runs straight 
into the principal thoroughfare of Warwick. The battle- 
mented turrets of the castle, embowered haTf-way up in 
foliage, and the tall, slender tower of St. Mary's Church, 
rising from among clustered roofs, have been visible 
almost from the commencement of the walk. Near the 
entrance of the town stands St. John's School-House, a 
picturesque old edifice of stone, with four peaked gables 
in a row, alternately plain and ornamented, and wide, 
projecting windows, and a spacious and venerable porch, 
all overgrown with moss and ivy, and shut in from the 
world by a high stone fence, not less mossy than the 
gabled front. There is an iron gate, through the rusty 
open-work of which you see a grassy lawn, and almost 



78 ABOUT WARWICK. 

expect to meet the shy, curious eyes of the little boys of 
past generations, peeping forth from their infantile an- 
tiquity into the strangeness of our present life. I find a 
peculiar charm in these long-established English schools, 
where the school-boy of to-day sits side by side, as it 
were, with his great-grandsire, on the same old benches, 
and often, I believe, thumbs a later, but unimproved edi- 
tion of the same old grammar or arithmetic. The new- 
fangled notions of a Yankee school-committee would 
madden many a pedagogue, and shake down the roof of 
many a time-honored seat of learning, in the mother- 
country. 

At. this point, however, we will turn back, in order to 
follow up the other road from Leamington, which was the 
one that I loved best to* take. It pursues a straight and 
level course, bordered by wide gravel-walks and overhung 
by the frequent elm, with here a cottage and there a villa, 
on one side a wooded plantation, and on the other a rich 
field of grass or grain, until, turning at right angles, it 
brings you to an arched bridge over the Avon. Its para- 
pet is a balustrade carved out of freestone, into the soft 
substance of which a multitude of persons have engraved 
their names or initials, many of them now illegible, while 
others, more deeply cut, are illuminated with fresh green 
moss. These tokens indicate a famous spot ; and casting 
our eyes along the smooth gleam and shadow of the quiet 
stream, through a vista of willows that droop on' either 
side into the water, we behold the gray magnificence of 
Warwick Castle, uplifting itself among stately trees, and 
rearing its turrets high above their loftiest branches. We 
can scarcely think the scene real, so completely do those 
machicolated towers, the long line of battlements, the 



ABOUT WARWICK. 79 

massive buttresses, the high-windowed walls, shape out 
our indistinct ideas of the antique time. It might rather 
seem as if the sleepy river (being Shakspeare's Avon, 
and often, no doubt, the mirror of his gorgeous visions) 
were dreaming now of a lordly residence that stood here 
many centuries ago; and this fantasy is strengthened, 
when you observe that the image in the tranquil water 
has all the distinctness of the actual structure. Either 
might be the reflection of the other. Wherever Time 
has gnawed one of the stones, you see the mark of his 
tooth just as plainly in the sunken reflection. Each is so 
perfect, that the upper vision seems a castle in the air, 
and the lower one an old stronghold of feudalism, mirac- 
ulously kept from decay in an enchanted river. 

A ruinous and ivy-grown bridge, that projects from the 
bank a little on the hither side of the castle, has the effect 
of making the scene appear more entirely apart from the 
every-day world, for it ends abruptly in the middle of the 
stream, — so that, if a cavalcade of the knights and ladies 
of romance should issue from the old walls, they could 
never tread on earthly ground, any more than we, ap- 
proaching from the side of modern realism, can overleap 
the gulf between our domain and theirs. Yet, if we 
seek to disenchant ourselves, it may readily be done. 
Crossing the bridge on which we stand, and passing a 
little farther on, we come to the entrance of the castle, 
abutting on the highway, and hospitably open at certain 
hours to all curious pilgrims who choose to disburse half 
a crown or so toward the support of the earl's domestics. 
The sight of that long series of historic rooms, full of such 
splendors and rarities as a great English family neces- 
sarily gathers about itself, in its hereditary abode, and in 



80 ABOUT WARWICK. 

the lapse of ages, is well worth the money, or ten times 
as much, if indeed the value of the spectacle could be 
reckoned in money's-worth. But after the attendant has 
hurried you from end to end of the edifice, repeating a 
guide-book by rote, and exorcising each successive hall 
of its poetic glamor and witchcraft by the mere tone in 
which he talks about it, you will make the doleful discov- 
ery that Warwick Castle has ceased to be a dream. It 
is better, methinks, to linger on the bridge, gazing at 
Caesar's Tower and Guy's Tower in the dim English 
sunshine above, and in the placid Avon below, and still 
keep them as thoughts in your own mind, than climb to 
their summits, or touch even a stone of their actual sub- 
stance. They will have all the more reality for you, as 
stalwart relics of immemorial time, if you are reverent 
enough to leave them in the intangible sanctity of a 
poetic vision. 

From the bridge over the Avon, the road passes in 
front of the castle-gate, and soon enters the principal 
street of Warwick, a little beyond St. John's School- 
House, already described. Chester itself, most antique 
of English towns, can hardly show quainter architectural 
shapes than many of the buildings that border this street. 
They are mostly of the timber-and-plaster kind, with 
bowed and decrepit ridge-poles, and a whole chronology 
of various patchwork in their walls; their low-browed 
door-ways open upon a sunken floor; their projecting 
stories peep, as it were, over one another's shoulders, and 
rise into a multiplicity of peaked gables ; they have curi- 
ous windows, breaking out irregularly all over the house, 
some even in the roof, set in their own little peaks, open- 
ing lattice-wise, and furnished with twenty small panes 



ABOUT WARWICK. 81 

of lozenge-shaped glass. The architecture of these edi- 
fices (a visible oaken framework, showing the whole 
skeleton of the house, — as if a man's bones should be 
arranged on his outside, and his flesh seen through the 
interstices) is often imitated by modern builders, and 
with sufficiently picturesque effect. The objection is, 
that such houses, like all imitations of by-gone styles, 
have an air of affectation ; they do not seem to be built 
in earnest ; they are no better than playthings, or over- 
grown baby-houses, in which nobody should be expected 
to encounter the serious realities of either birth or death. 
Besides, originating nothing, we leave no fashions for 
another age to copy, when we ourselves shall have grown 
antique. 

Old as it looks, all this portion of Warwick has over- 
brimmed, as it were, from the original settlement, being 
outside of the ancient wall. The street soon runs under 
an arched gateway, with a church or some other vener- 
able structure above it, and admits us into the heart of 
the town. At one of my first visits, I witnessed a mili- 
tary display. A regiment of Warwickshire militia, prob- 
ably commanded by the Earl, was going through its drill 
in the market-place ; and on the collar of one of the 
officers was embroidered the Bear and Ragged Staff, 
which has been the cognizance of the Warwick earldom 
from time immemorial. The soldiers were sturdy young 
men, with the simple, stolid, yet kindly, faces of English 
rustics, looking exceedingly well in a body, but slouching 
into a yeoman-like carriage and appearance, the moment 
they were dismissed from drill. Squads of them were 
distributed everywhere about the streets, and sentinels 
were posted at various points ; and I saw a sergeant, 



82 ABOUT WARWICK. 

with a great key in his hand, (big enough to have been 
the key of the castle's main entrance when the gate was 
thickest and heaviest,) apparently setting a guard. Thus, 
centuries after feudal times are past, we find warriors 
still gathering under the old castle-walls, and commanded 
by a feudal lord, just as in the days of the King-Maker, 
who, no doubt, often mustered his retainers in the same 
market-place where I beheld this modern regiment. 

The interior of the town wears a less old-fashioned 
aspect than the suburbs through which we approach it ; 
and the High Street has shops with modern plate-glass, 
and buildings with stuccoed fronts, exhibiting as few pro- 
jections to hang a thought or sentiment upon as if an 
architect of to-day had planned them. And, indeed, so 
far as their ^surface goes, they are perhaps new enough 
to stand unabashed in an American street; but behind 
these renovated faces, with their monotonous lack of ex- 
pression, there is probably the substance of the same old 
town that wore a Gothic exterior in the Middle Ages. 
The street is an emblem of England itself. What seems 
new in it is chiefly a skilful and fortunate adaptation of 
what such a people as ourselves would destroy. The 
new things are based and supported on sturdy old things, 
and derive a massive strength from their deep and im- 
memorial foundations, though with such limitations and 
impediments as only an Englishman could endure. But 
he likes to feel the weight of all the past upon his back ; 
and, moreover, the antiquity that overburdens him has 
taken root in his being, and has grown to be rather a 
hump than a pack, so that there is no getting rid of it 
without tearing his whole structure to pieces. In my 
judgment, as he appears to be sufficiently comfortable 



ABOUT WARWICK. 83 

under the mouldy accretion, he had better stumble on 
with it as long as he can. He presents a spectacle 
which is by no means without its charm for a disinter- 
ested and unincumbered observer. 

When the old edifice, or the antiquated custom or in- 
stitution, appears in its pristine form, without any attempt 
at intermarrying it with modern fashions, an American 
.cannot but admire the picturesque effect produced by the 
sudden cropping up of an apparently dead-and-buried 
state of society into the actual present, of which he is 
himself a part. We need not go far in Warwick without 
encountering an instance of the kind. • Proceeding west- 
ward through the town, we find ourselves confronted by 
a huge mass of natural rock, hewn into something like 
architectural shape, and penetrated by a vaulted passage, 
which may well have been one of King Cymbeline's 
original gateways ; and on the top of the rock, over the 
archway, sits a small, old church, communicating with an 
ancient edifice, or assemblage of edifices, that look down 
from a similar elevation on the side of the street. A 
range of trees half hides the latter establishment from 
the sun. It presents a curious and venerable speci- 
men of the timber-and-plaster style of building, in 
which some of the finest old houses in England are 
constructed ; the front projects into porticos and vesti- 
bules, and rises into many gables, some in a row, 
and others crowning semi-detached portions of the struc- 
ture ; the windows mostly open on hinges, but show a 
delightful irregularity of shape and position ; a multi- 
plicity of chimneys break through the roof at their own 
will, or, at least, without any settled purpose of the archi- 
tect. The whole affair looks very old, — so old, indeed, 



84 ABOUT WARWICK. 

that the front bulges forth, as if the timber framework 
were a little weary, at last, of standing erect so long ; 
but the state of repair is so perfect, and there is such ah 
indescribable aspect of continuous vitality within the sys- 
tem of this aged house, that you feel confident that there 
may be safe shelter yet, and perhaps for centuries to 
come, under its time-honored roof. And on a bench, 
sluggishly enjoying the sunshine, and looking into the. 
street of Warwick as from a life apart, a few old men 
are generally to be seen, wrapped in long cloaks, on which 
you may detect the glistening of a silver badge represent- 
ing the Bear and Ragged Staff. These decorated worthies 
are some of the twelve brethren of Leicester's Hospital, 
— a community which subsists to-day under the identical 
modes that were established for it in the reign of Queen 
Elizabeth, and of course retains many features of a social 
life that has vanished almost everywhere else. 

The edifice itself dates from a much older period than 
the charitable institution of which it is now the home. 
It was the seat of a religious fraternity far back in the 
Middle Ages, and continued so till Henry VIII. turned 
all the priesthood of England out-of-doors, and put the 
most unscrupulous of his favorites into their vacant 
abodes. In many instances, the old monks had chosen 
the sites of their domiciles so well, and built them on 
such a broad system of beauty and convenience, that 
their lay-occupants found it easy to convert them into 
stately and comfortable homes ; and as such they still 
exist, with something of the antique reverence lingering 
about them. The structure now before us seems to have 
been first granted to Sir Nicholas Lestrange, who per- 
haps intended, like other men, to establish his household 



ABOUT WARWICK. 85 

gods in the niches whence he had thrown down the im- 
ages of saints, and to lay his hearth where an altar had 
stood. But there was probably a natural reluctance hi 
those days (when Catholicism, so lately repudiated, must 
needs have retained an influence over all but the most 
obdurate characters) to bring one's hopes of domestic 
prosperity and a fortunate lineage into direct hostility 
'with the awful claims of the ancient religion. At all 
events, there is still a superstitious idea, betwixt a fantasy 
and a belief, that the possession of former Church-prop- 
erty has drawn a curse along with it, not only among the 
posterity of those to whom it was originally granted, but 
wherever it has subsequently been transferred, even if 
honestly bought and paid for. There are families, now 
inhabiting some of the beautiful old abbeys, who appear 
to indulge a species of pride in recording the strange 
deaths and ugly shapes of misfortune that have occurred 
among their predecessors, and may be supposed likely 
to dog their own pathway down the ages of futurity. 
Whether Sir Nicholas Lestrange, in the beef-eating days 
of Old Harry and Elizabeth, was a nervous man, and 
subject to apprehensions of this kind, I cannot tell ; but 
it is certain that he speedily rid himself of the spoils of 
the Church, and that, within twenty years afterwards, 
the edifice became the property of the famous Dudley, 
Earl of Leicester, brother of the Earl of Warwick. He 
devoted the ancient religious precinct to a charitable use, 
endowing it with an ample revenue, and making it the 
perpetual home of twelve poor, honest, and war-broken 
soldiers, mostly his own retainers, and natives either of 
Warwickshire or Gloucestershire. These veterans, or 
others wonderfully like them, still occupy their monkish 



86 ABOUT WARWICK. 

dormitories and haunt the time-darkened corridors and 
galleries of the hospital, leading a life of old-fashioned 
comfort, wearing the old-fashioned cloaks, and burnishing 
the identical silver badges which the Earl of Leicester 
gave to the original twelve. He is said to have been a 
bad man in his day ; but he has succeeded in prolonging 
one good deed into what was to him a distant future. 

On the projecting story, over the arched entrance, there 
is the date, 1571, and several coats-of-arms, either the 
Earl's or those of his kindred, and immediately above the 
door- way a stone sculpture of the Bear and Ragged Staff. 

Passing through the arch, we find ourselves in a quad- 
rangle, or enclosed court, such as always formed the cen- 
tral part of a great family residence in Queen Elizabeth's 
time, and earlier. There can hardly be a more perfect 
specimen of such an establishment than Leicester's Hos- 
pital. The quadrangle is a sort of sky-roofed hall, to 
which there is convenient access from all parts of the 
house. The four inner fronts, with their high, steep 
roofs and sharp gables, look into it from antique windows, 
and through open corridors and galleries along the sides ; 
and there seems to be a richer display of architectural 
devices and ornaments, quainter carvings in oak, and 
more fantastic shapes of the timber framework, than on 
the side toward the street. On the wall opposite the 
arched entrance are the following inscriptions, comprising 
such moral rules, I presume, as were deemed most essen- 
tial for the daily observance of the community: " jO^OIt- 

or all J*lm» — "iFcac <£crtr" — "pernor tlje 

Htnfl" — "HLOtoe tijt iSrOtfjtlljOOtr " ; and again, 
as if this latter injunction needed emphasis and repeti- 
tion among a household of aged people soured with the 



ABOUT WARWICK. 87 

hard fortune of their previous lives, — " J$0 tttUTJlS 
affCCttOltrtr OtTC tO ailOtljCr." One sentence, over a 
door communicating with the Master's side of the house, 
is addressed to that dignitary, — " ffyt tfjtlt tlliCt!) 
OtoCt* lUClt mUSt lie jUUt." All these are charac- 
tered in old English letters, and form part of the elabo- 
rate ornamentation of the house. Everywhere — on the 
walls, over windows and doors, and at all points where 
there is room to place them — appear escutcheons of 
arms, cognizances, and crests, emblazoned in their proper 
colors, and illuminating the ancient quadrangle with their 
splendor. One of these devices is a large image of a 
porcupine on an heraldic wreath, being the crest of the 
Lords de Lisle. But especially is the cognizance of the 
Bear and Ragged Staff repeated over and over, and over 
again and again, in a great variety of attitudes, at full- 
length and half-length, in paint and in oaken sculpture, 
in bas-relief and rounded image. The founder of the 
hospital was certainly disposed to reckon his own benefi- 
cence as among the hereditary glories of his race ; and 
had he lived and died a half-century earlier, he would 
have kept up an old Catholic custom by enjoining the 
twelve bedesmen to pray for the welfare of his soul. 

At my first visit, some of the brethren were seated on 
the bench outside of the edifice, looking down into the 
street ; but they did not vouchsafe me a word, and seemed 
so estranged from modern life, so enveloped in antique 
customs and old-fashioned cloaks, that to converse with 
them w T ould have been like shouting across the gulf be- 
tween our age and Queen Elizabeth's. So I passed into 
the quadrangle, and found it quite solitary, except that a 
plain and neat old woman happened to be crossing it, 



88 ABOUT WARWICK. 

with an aspect of business and carefulness that bespoke 
her a woman of this world, and not merely a shadow of 
the past. Asking her if I could come in, she answered 
very readily and civilly that I might, and said that I was 
free to look about me, hinting a hope, however, that I 
would not open the private doors of the brotherhood, as 
some visitors were in the habit of doing. Under her 
guidance, I went into what was formerly the great hall 
of the establishment, where King James I. had once 
been feasted by an Earl of Warwick, as is commemorated 
by an inscription on the cobwebbed and dingy wall. It 
is a very spacious and barn-like apartment, with a brick 
floor, and a vaulted roof, the rafters of which are oaken 
beams, wonderfully carved, but hardly visible in the duski- 
ness that broods aloft. The hall may have made a splen- 
did appearance, when it was decorated with rich tapestry, 
and illuminated with chandeliers, cressets, and torches 
glistening upon silver dishes, where King James sat at 
supper among his brilliantly dressed nobles ; but it has 
come to base uses in these latter days, — being improved, 
in Yankee phrase, as ' a brewery and wash-room, and as 
a cellar for the brethren's separate allotments of coal. 

The old lady here left me to myself, and I returned 
into the quadrangle. It was very quiet, very handsome, 
in its own obsolete style, and must be an exceedingly 
comfortable place for the old people to lounge in, when 
the inclement winds render it inexpedient to walk abroad. 
There are shrubs against the wall, on one side ; and on 
another is a cloistered walk, adorned with stags' heads 
and antlers, and running beneath a covered gallery, up to 
which ascends a balustraded staircase. In the portion of 
the edifice opposite the entrance-arch are the apartments 



ABOUT WARWICK. 80 

of the Master ; and looking into the window, (as the old 
woman, at no request of mine, had specially informed me 
that I might,) I saw a low, but vastly comfortable parlor, 
very handsomely furnished, and altogether a luxurious 
place. It had a fireplace with an immense arch, the 
antique breadth of which extended almost from wall to 
wall of the room, though now fitted up in such a way 
that the modern coal-grate looked very diminutive in the 
midst. Gazing into this pleasant interior, it seemed to 
me, that, among these venerable surroundings, availing 
himself of whatever was good in former things, and eking 
out their imperfection with the results of modern ingenu- 
ity, the Master might lead a not unenviable life. On 
the cloistered side of the quadrangle, where the dark 
oak panels made the enclosed space dusky, I beheld a 
curtained window reddened by a great blaze from within, 
and heard the bubbling and squeaking of something — 
doubtless very nice and succulent — that Avas being 
cooked at the kitchen-fire. I think, indeed, that a whiff 
or two of the savory fragrance reached my nostrils ; at 
all events, the impression grew upon me that Leicester's 
Hospital is one of the jolliest old domiciles in England. 
I was about to depart, when another old woman, very 
plainly dressed, but fat, comfortable, and with a cheerful 
twinkle in her eyes, came in through the arch, and 
looked curiously at me. This repeated apparition of the 
gentle sex (though by no means under its loveliest guise) 
had still an agreeable effect in modifying my ideas of an 
institution which I had supposed to be of a stern and 
monastic character. She asked whether I wished to see 
the hospital, and said that the porter, whose office it was 
to attend to visitors, was dead, and would be buried that 



90 ABOUT WARWICK. 

very day, so that the whole establishment could not con- 
veniently be shown me. She kindly invited me, how- 
ever, to visit the apartment occupied by her husband and 
herself; so I followed her up the antique staircase, along 
the gallery, and into a small, oak-panelled parlor, where 
sat an old man in a long blue garment, who arose and 
saluted me with much courtesy. He seemed a very quiet 
person, and yet had a look of travel and adventure, and 
gray experience, such as I could have fancied in a palmer 
of ancient times, who might likewise have worn a similar 
costume. The little room was carpeted and neatly fur- 
nished ; a portrait of its occupant was hanging on the 
wall ; and on a table were two swords crossed, — one, 
probably, his own battle-weapon, and the other, which I 
drew half out of the scabbard, had an inscription on the 
blade, purporting that it had been taken from the field of 
Waterloo. My kind old hostess was anxious to exhibit 
all the particulars of their housekeeping, and led me into 
the bedroom, which was in the nicest order, with a snow- 
white quilt upon the bed; and in a little intervening 
room was a washing and bathing apparatus, — a conven- 
ience (judging from the personal aspect and atmosphere 
of such parties) seldom to be met with in the humbler 
ranks of British life. 

The old soldier and his wife both seemed glad of some- 
body to talk with ; but the good woman availed herself 
of the privilege far more copiously than the veteran him- 
self, insomuch that he felt it expedient to give her an 
occasional nudge with his elbow in her well-padded ribs. 
" Don't you be so talkative ! " quoth he ; and, indeed, he 
could hardly find space for a word, and quite as little 
after his admonition as before. Her nimble tongue ran 



ABOUT WARWICK. 91 

over the whole system of life in the hospital. The breth- 
ren, she said, had a yearly stipend, (the amount of which 
she did not mention,) and such decent lodgings as I saw, 
and some other advantages, free ; and, instead of being 
pestered with a great many rules, and made to dine to- 
gether at a great table, they could manage their little 
household matters as they liked, buying their own din- 
ners, and having them cooked in the general kitchen, and 
eating them snugly in their own parlors. "And," added 
she, rightly deeming this the crowning privilege, " with 
the Master's permission, they can have their wives to 
take care of them ; and no harm comes of it ; and what 
more can an old man desire ? " It was evident enough 
that the good dame found herself in what she considered 
very rich clover, and, moreover, had plenty of small occu- 
pations to keep her from getting rusty and dull ; but the 
veteran impressed me as deriving far less enjoyment from 
the monotonous ease, without fear of change or hope of 
improvement, that had followed upon thirty years of peril 
and vicissitude. I fancied, too, that, while pleased with 
the novelty of a stranger's visit, he was still a little shy 
of becoming a spectacle for the stranger's curiosity ; for, 
if he chose to be morbid about the matter, the establish- 
ment was but an almshouse, in spite of its old-fashioned 
magnificence, and his fine blue cloak only a pauper's gar- 
ment, with a silver badge on it that perhaps galled his 
shoulder. In truth, the badge and the peculiar garb, 
though quite in accordance with the manners of the Earl 
of Leicester's age, are repugnant to modern prejudices, 
and might fitly and humanely be abolished. 

A year or two afterwards I paid another visit to the 
hospital, and found a new porter established in office, and 



92 ABOUT WARWICK. 

already capable of talking like a guide-book about the 
history, antiquities, and present condition of the charity. 
He informed me that the twelve brethren are selected 
from among old soldiers of good character, whose other 
resources must not exceed an income of five pounds ; 
thus excluding all commissioned officers, whose half-pay 
would of course be more than that amount. They receive 
from the hospital an annuity of eighty pounds each, be- 
sides their apartments, a garment of fine blue cloth, an 
annual abundance of ale, and a privilege at the kitchen- 
fire ; so that, considering the class from which they are 
taken, they may well reckon themselves among the for- 
tunate of the earth. Furthermore, they are invested 
with political rights, acquiring a vote for member of Par- 
liament in virtue either of their income or brotherhood. 
On the other hand, as regards their personal freedom or 
conduct, they are subject to a supervision which the Mas- 
ter of the hospital might render extremely annoying, 
were he so inclined ; but the military restraint under 
which they have spent the active portion of their lives 
makes it easier for them to endure the domestic discipline 
here imposed upon their age. The porter bore his testi- 
mony (whatever were its value) to their being as con- 
tented and happy as such a set of old people could 
possibly be, and affirmed that they spent much time 
in burnishing their silver badges, and were as proud of 
them as a nobleman of his star. These badges, by-the- 
by, except one that was stolen and replaced in Queen 
Anne's time, are the very same that decorated the orig- 
inal twelve brethren. 

I have seldom met with a better guide than my friend 
the porter. He appeared to take a genuine interest in 



ABOUT WARWICK. 93 

the peculiarities of the establishment, and yet had an 
existence apart from them, so that he could the better 
estimate what those peculiarities were. To be sure, his 
knowledge and observation were confined to external 
things, but, so far, had a sufficiently extensive scope. 
He led me up the staircase and exhibited portions of the 
timber framework of the edifice that are reckoned to be 
eight or nine hundred years old, and are still neither 
worm-eaten nor decayed ; and traced out what had been 
a great hall, in the days of the Catholic fraternity, though 
its area is now filled up with the apartments of the twelve 
brethren ; and pointed to ornaments of sculptured oak, 
done in an ancient religious style of art, but hardly vis- 
ible amid the vaulted dimness of the roof. Thence we 
went to the chapel — the Gothic church which I noted 
several pages back — surmounting the gateway that 
stretches half across the street. Here the brethren 
attend daily prayer, and have each a prayer-book of 
the finest paper, with a fair, large type for their old 
eyes. The interior of the chapel is very plain, with a 
picture of no merit for an altar-piece, and a single old 
pane of painted glass in the great eastern window, rep- 
resenting — no saint, nor angel, as is customary in such 
cases — but that grim sinner, the Earl of Leicester. 
Nevertheless, amid so many tangible proofs of his human 
sympathy, one comes to doubt whether the Earl could 
have been such a hardened reprobate, after all. 

We ascended the tower of the chapel, and looked 
down between its battlements into the street, a hundred 
feet below us ; while clambering half-way up were fox- 
glove-flowers, weeds, small shrubs, and tufts of grass, that 
had rooted themselves into the roughnesses of the stone 



94 ABOUT WARWICK. 

foundation. Far around us lay a rich and lovely English 
landscape, with many a church-spire and noble country- 
seat, and several objects of high historic interest. Edge 
Hill, where the Puritans defeated Charles I., is in sight 
on the edge of the horizon, and much nearer stands the 
house where Cromwell lodged on the night before 
the battle. Right under our eyes, and half-enveloping 
the town with its high-shouldering wall, so that all the 
closely compacted streets seemed but a precinct of the 
estate, was the Earl of Warwick's delightful park, a 
wide extent of sunny lawns, interspersed with broad 
contiguities of forest-shade. Some of the cedars of Leb- 
anon were there, — a growth of trees in which the War- 
wick family take an hereditary pride. The two highest 
towers of the castle heave themselves up out of a mass 
of foliage, and look down in a lordly manner upon the 
plebeian roofs of the town, a part of which are slate-cov- 
ered, (these are the modern houses,) and a part are 
coated with old red tiles, denoting the more ancient 
edifices. A hundred and sixty or seventy years ago, 
a great fire destroyed a considerable portion of the 
town, and doubtless annihilated many structures of a 
remote antiquity ; at least, there was a possibility of 
very old houses in the long past of Warwick, which 
King Cymbeline is said to have founded in the year 
one of the Christian era ! 

And this historic fact or poetic fiction, whichever it 
may be, brings to mind a more indestructible reality than 
anything else that has occurred within the present field 
of our vision ; though this includes the scene of Guy of 
Warwick's legendary exploits, and some of those of the 
Round Table, to say nothing of the Battle of Edge Hill. 



ABOUT WARWICK. 95 

For perhaps it was in the landscape now under our eyes 
that Postlmmus wandered with the King's daughter, the 
sweet, chaste, faithful, and courageous Imogen, the ten- 
derest and womanliest woman that Shakspeare ever 
made immortal in the world. The silver Avon, which 
we see flowing so quietly by the gray castle, may have 
held their images in its bosom. 

The day, though it began brightly, had long been over- 
cast, and the clouds now spat down a few spiteful drops 
upon us, besides that the east-wind was very chill; so 
we descended the winding tower-stair, and went next into 
the garden, one side of which is shut in by almost the 
only remaining portion of the old city-wall. A part of 
the garden-ground is devoted to grass and shrubbery, and 
permeated by gravel-walks, in the centre of one of which 
is a beautiful stone vase of Egyptian sculpture, that for- 
merly stood on the top of a Nilometer, or graduated pillar 
for measuring the rise and fall of the River Nile. On 
the pedestal is a Latin inscription by Dr. Parr, who (his 
vicarage of Hatton being so close at hand) was probably 
often the Master's guest, and smoked his interminable 
pipe along these garden-walks. Of the vegetable-garden, 
which lies adjacent, the lion's share is appropriated to 
the Master, and twelve small, separate patches to the 
individual brethren, who cultivate them at their own 
judgment and by their own labor ; and their beans and 
cauliflower^ have a better flavor, I doubt not, than if 
they had received them directly from the dead hand of 
the Earl of Leicester, like the rest of their food. In 
the farther part of the garden is an arbor for the old 
men's pleasure and convenience, and I should like well 
to sit down among them there, and find out what is really 



90 ABOUT WARWICK. 

the bitter and the sweet of such a sort of life. As for 
the old gentlemen themselves, they put me queerly in 
mind of the Salem Custom-House, and the venerable 
personages whom I found so quietly at anchor there. 

The Master's residence, forming one entire side of the 
quadrangle, fronts on the garden, and wears an aspect at 
once stately and homely. It can hardly have undergone 
any perceptible change within three centuries; but the 
garden, into which its old windows look, has probably 
put off a great many eccentricities and quaintnesses, in 
the way of cunningly clipped shrubbery, since the gar- 
dener of Queen Elizabeth's reign threw down his rusty 
shears and took his departure. The present Master's 
name is Harris; he is a descendant of the founder's 
family, a gentleman of independent fortune, and a clergy- 
man of the Established Church, as the regulations of the 
hospital require him to be. I know not what are his 
official emoluments ; but, according to all English pre- 
cedent, an ancient charitable fund is certain to be held 
directly for the behoof of those who administer it, and 
perhaps incidentally, in a moderate way, for the nominal 
beneficiaries ; and, in the case before us, the twelve 
brethren being so comfortably provided for, the Master 
is likely to be at least as comfortable as all the twelve 
together. Yet I ought not, even in a distant land, to fling 
an idle gibe against a gentleman of whom I really know 
nothing, except that the people under his charge bear all 
possible tokens of being tended and cared for as sedu- 
lously as if each of them sat by a warm fireside of Ins 
own, with a daughter bustling round the hearth to make 
ready his porridge and his titbits. It is delightful to 
think of the good life which a suitable man, in the 



ABOUT WARWICK. 97 

Master's position, has an opportunity to lead, — linked to 
time-honored customs, welded in with an ancient sys- 
tem, never dreaming of radical change, and bringing all 
the mellowness and richness of the past down into these 
railway-days, which do not compel him or his community 
to move a whit quicker than of yore. Everybody can 
appreciate the advantages of going ahead ; it might be 
well, sometimes, to think whether there is not a word or 
two to be said in favor of standing still, or going to sleep. 
From the garden we went into the kitchen, where the 
fire was burning hospitably, and diffused a genial warmth 
far and wide, together with the fragrance of some old 
English roas^beef, which, I think, must at that moment 
have been done nearly to a turn. The kitchen is a lofty, 
spacious, and noble room, partitioned off round the fire- 
place, by a sort of semicircular oaken screen, or rather, 
an arrangement of heavy and high-backed settles, with 
an ever open entrance between them, on either side of 
which is the omnipresent image of the Bear and Ragged 
Staff, three feet high, and excellently carved in oak, now 
black with time and unctuous kitchen-smoke. The pon- 
derous mantel-piece, likewise of carved oak, towers high 
towards the dusky ceiling, and extends its mighty breadth 
to take in a vast area of hearth, the arch of the fireplace 
being positively so immense that I could compare it to 
nothing but the city gateway. Above its cavernous open- 
ing were crossed two ancient halberds, the weapons, pos- 
sibly, of soldiers who had fought under Leicester in the 
Low Countries ; and elsewhere on the walls were dis- 
played several muskets, which some of the present in- 
mates of the hospital may have levelled against the 
French. Another ornament of the mantel-piece was a 
7 



98 ABOUT WARWICK. 

square of silken needlework or embroidery, faded nearly 
white, but dimly representing that wearisome Bear and 
Ragged Staff, which we should hardly look twice at, only 
that it was wrought by the fair fingers of poor Amy 
Robsart, and beautifully framed in oak from Kenilworth 
Castle, at the expense of a Mr. Conner, a countryman 
of our own. Certainly, no Englishman would be capable 
of this little bit of enthusiasm. Finally, the kitchen-fire- 
light glistens on a splendid display of copper flagons, all 
of generous capacity, and one of them about as big as a 
half-barrel ; the smaller vessels contain the customary 
allowance of ale, and the larger one is filled with that 
foaming liquor on four festive occasions of the year, and 
emptied amain by the jolly brotherhood. I should be 
glad to see them do it ; but it would be an exploit fitter 
for Queen Elizabeth's age than these degenerate times. 
The kitchen is the social hall of the twelve brethren. 
In the daytime, they bring their little messes to be 
cooked here, and eat them in their own parlors ; but after 
a certain hour, the great hearth is cleared and swept, and 
the old men assemble round its blaze, each with his tank- 
ard and his pipe, and hold high converse through the 
evening. If the Master be a fit man for his office, me- 
thinks he will sometimes sit down sociably among them ; 
for there is an elbow-chair by the fireside which it would 
not demean his dignity to fill, since it was occupied by 
King James at the great festival of nearly three centuries 
ago. A sip of the ale and a whiff of the tobacco-pipe 
would put him in friendly relations with his venerable 
household ; and then we can fancy him instructing them 
by pithy apothegms and religious texts which were first 
uttered here by some Catholic priest and have impreg- 



ABOUT WARWICK. 99 

nated the atmosphere ever since. If a joke goes round, 
it shall be of an elder coinage than Joe Miller's, as old as 
Lord Bacon's collection, or as the jest-book that Master 
Slender asked for when he lacked small-talk for sweet 
Anne Page. No news shall be spoken of, later than the 
drifting ashore, on the northern coast, of some stern-post 
or figure-head, a barnacled fragment of one of the great 
galleons of the Spanish Armada. What a tremor would 
pass through the antique group, if a damp newspaper 
should suddenly be spread to dry before the fire ! They 
would feel as if either that printed sheet or they them- 
selves must be an unreality. What a mysterious awe, if 
the shriek o£ the railway-train, as it reaches the Warwick 
station, should ever so faintly invade their ears ! Move- 
ment of any kind seems inconsistent- with the stability 
of such an institution. Nevertheless, I trust that the 
ages will carry it along with them ; because it is such a 
pleasant kind of dream for an American to find his way 
thither, and behold a piece of the sixteenth century set 
into our prosaic times, and then to depart, and think of 
its arched door-way as a spell-guarded entrance which 
will never be accessible or visible to him any more. 

Not far from the market-place of Warwick stands the 
great church of St. Mary's : a vast edifice, indeed, and 
almost worthy to be a cathedral. People wdio pretend 
( to skill in such matters say that it is in a poor style of 
■ architecture, though designed (or, at least, extensively 
restored) by Sir Christopher Wren ; but I thought it very 
striking, Avith its wide, high, and elaborate windows, its 
tall towers, its immense length, and (for it was long 
before I outgrew this Americanism, the love of an old 
thing merely for the sake of its age) the tinge of gray 



100 ABOUT WARWICK. 

antiquity over the whole. Once, while I stood gazing 
up at the tower, the clock struck twelve with a very 
deep intonation, and immediately some chimes began to 
play, and kept up their resounding music for five minutes, 
as measured by the hand upon the dial. It was a very 
delightful harmony, as airy as the notes of birds, and 
seemed a not unbecoming freak of half-sportive fancy in 
the huge, ancient, and solemn church ; although I have 
seen an old-fashioned parlor-clock that did precisely the 
same thing, in its small way. 

The great attraction of this edifice is the Beauchamp 
(or, as the English, who delight in vulgarizing their fine 
old Norman names, call it, the Beechum) Chapel, where 
the Earls of Warwick and their kindred have been 
buried, from four hundred years back till within a recent 
period. It is a stately and very elaborate chapel, with a 
large window of ancient painted glass, as perfectly pre- 
served as any that I remember seeing in England, and 
remarkably vivid in its colors. Here are several monu- 
ments with marble figures recumbent upon them, repre- 
senting the Earls in their knightly armor, and their 
dames in the ruffs and court-finery of their day, looking 
hardly stiffer in stone than they must needs have been in 
their starched linen and embroidery. The renowned 
Earl of Leicester of Queen Elizabeth's time, the bene- 
factor of the hospital, reclines at full length on the tablet 
of one of these tombs, side by side with his Countess, — 
not Amy Robsart, but a lady who (unless I have confused 
the story with some other mouldy scandal) is said to have 
avenged poor Amy's murder by poisoning the Earl him- 
self. Be that as it may, both figures, and especially the 
Earl, look like the very types of ancient Honor and Con- 



ABOUT WARWICK. 101 

jugal Faith. In consideration of his long-enduring kind- 
ness to the twelve brethren, I cannot consent to believe 
him as wicked as he is usually depicted ; and it seems a 
marvel, now that so many well-established historical ver- 
dicts have been reversed, why some enterprising writer 
does not make out Leicester to have been the pattern 
nobleman of his age. 

In the centre of the chapel is the magnificent memo- 
rial of its founder, Richard Beauchamp, Earl of War- 
wick in the time of Henry VI. On a richly ornamented 
altar-tomb of gray marble lies the bronze figure of a 
knight in gilded armor, most admirably executed : for 
the sculptors of those clays had wonderful skill in their 
own style, and could make so life-like an image of a 
warrior, in brass or marble, that, if a trumpet were 
sounded over his tomb, you would expect him to start 
up and handle his sword. The Earl whom we now 
speak of, however, has slept soundly in spite of a more 
serious disturbance than any blast of a trumpet, unless it 
were the final one. Some centuries after his death, the 
floor of the chapel fell down and broke open the stone 
coffin in which he was buried ; and among the fragments 
appeared the anciently entombed Earl of Warwick, with 
the color scarcely faded out of his cheeks, his eyes a little 
sunken, but in other respects looking as natural as if he 
had died yesterday. But exposure to the atmosphere 
appeared to begin and finish the long-delayed process of 
decay in a moment, causing him to vanish like a bubble ; 
so that, almost before there had been time to wonder at 
him, there was nothing left of the stalwart Earl save his 
hair. This sole relic the ladies of Warwick made prize 
of, and braided it into rings and brooches for their own 



102 ABOUT WARWICK. 

adornment; and thus, with a chapel and a ponderous 
tomb built on purpose to protect his remains, this great 
nobleman could not help being brought untimely to the 
light of day, nor even keep his lovelocks on his skull 
after he had so long done with love. There seems to be 
a fatality that disturbs people in their sepulchres, when 
they have been over-careful to render them magnificent 
and impregnable, — as witness the builders of the Pyra- 
mids, and Hadrian, Augustus, and the Scipios, and most 
other personages whose mausoleums have been conspicu- 
ous enough to attract the violator ; and as for dead men's 
hair, I have seen a lock of King Edward the Fourth's, 
of a reddish-brown color, which perhaps was once twisted 
round the delicate forefinger of Mistress Shore. 

The direct lineage of the renowned characters that lie 
buried in this splendid chapel has long been extinct. 
The earldom is now held by the Grevilles, descendants of 
the Lord Brooke who was slain in the Parliamentary War ; 
and they have recently (that is to say, within a century) 
built a burial-vault on the other side of the church, cal- 
culated (as the sexton assured me, with a nod as if he 
were pleased) to afford suitable and respectful ac- 
commodation to as many as fourscore coffins. Thank 
Heaven, the old man did not call them " caskets " ! — 
a vile modern phrase, which compels a person of sense 
and good taste to shrink more disgustfully than ever 
before from the idea of being buried at all. But as 
regards those eighty coffins, only sixteen have as yet 
been contributed ; and it may be a question with some 
minds, not merely whether the Grevilles will hold the 
earldom of Warwick until the full number shall be made 
up, but whether earldoms and all manner of lordships 



ABOUT WARWICK. 103 

will not have faded out of England long before those 
many generations shall have passed from the castle to 
the vault. I hope not. A titled and landed aristocracy, 
if anywise an evil and an incumbrance, is so only to the 
nation which is doomed to bear it on its shoulders ; and 
an American, whose sole relation to it is to admire its 
picturesque effect upon society, ought to be the last man 
to quarrel with what affords him so much gratuitous en- 
joyment. Nevertheless, conservative as England is, and 
though I scarce ever found an Englishman who seemed 
really to desire change, there was continually a dull 
sound in my ears as if the old foundations of things were 
crumbling away. Some time or other, — by no irrever- 
ent effort of violence, but, rather, in spite of all pious 
efforts to uphold a heterogeneous pile of institutions that 
will have outlasted their vitality, — at some unexpected 
moment, there must come a terrible crash. The sole 
reason why I should desire it to happen in my day is, 
that I might be there to see ! But the ruin of my own 
country is, perhaps, all that I am destined to witness ; 
and that immense catastrophe (though I am strong in the 
faith that there is a national lifetime of a thousand years 
in us yet) would serve any man well enough as his final 
spectacle on earth. 

If the visitor is inclined to carry aw r ay any little me- 
morial of Warwick he had better go to an Old Curi- 
osity Shop in the High Street, w r here. there is a vast 
quantity of obsolete gewgaws, great and small, and many 
of them so pretty and ingenious that you wonder how 
they came to be thrown aside and forgotten. As regards 
its minor tastes, the world changes, but does not improve ; 
it appears to me, indeed, that there have been epochs of 



104 ABOUT WARWICK. 

far more exquisite fancy than the present one, in matters 
of personal ornament, and such delicate trifles as we put 
upon a drawing-room table, a mantel-piece, or a what- 
not. The shop in question is near the East Gate, but is 
hardly to be found without careful search, being denoted 
only by the name of " Redfern," painted not very con- 
spicuously in the top-light of the door. Immediately on 
entering, we find ourselves among a confusion of old rub- 
bish and valuables, ancient armor, historic portraits, ebony 
cabinets inlaid with pearl, tall, ghostly clocks, hideous old 
china, dim looking-glasses in frames of tarnished magnifi- 
cence, — a thousand objects of strange aspect, and others 
that almost frighten you by their likeness in unlikeness 
to things now in use. It is impossible to give an idea of 
the variety of articles, so thickly strewn about that we 
can scarcely move without overthrowing some great curi- 
osity with a crash, or sweeping away some small one 
hitched to our sleeves. Three stories of the entire house 
are crowded in like manner. The collection, even as we 
see it exposed to view, must have been got together at 
great cost ; but the real treasures of the establishment 
lie in secret repositories, whence they are not likely to 
be drawn forth at an ordinary summons; though, if a 
gentleman with a competently long purse should call for 
them, I doubt not that the signet-ring of Joseph's friend 
Pharaoh, or the Duke of Alva's leading-staff, or the dag- 
ger that killed the Duke of Buckingham, (all of which 
I have seen,) or any other almost incredible thing, might 
make its appearance. Gold snuff-boxes, antique gems, 
jewelled goblets, Venetian wine-glasses, (which burst 
when poison is poured into them, and therefore must not 
be used for modem wine-drinking,) jasper-handled knives, 



ABOUT WARWICK. 105 

painted Sevres tea-cups, — in short, there are all sorts 
of things that a virtuoso ransacks the world to discover. 

It would be easier to spend a hundred pounds in Mr. 
Redfern's shop than to keep the money in one's pocket ; 
but, for my part, I contented myself with buying a little 
old spoon of silver-gilt, and fantastically shaped, and got 
it at all the more reasonable rate because there hap- 
pened to be no legend attached to it. I could supply 
any deficiency of that kind at much less expense than 
regilding the spoon! 



EECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

From Leamington to Stratford-on-Avon the distance 
is eight or nine miles, over a road that seemed to me 
most beautiful. Not that I can recall any memorable 
peculiarities ; for the country, most of the way, is a suc- 
cession of the gentlest swells and subsidences, affording 
wide and far glimpses of champaign scenery here and 
there, and sinking almost to a dead level as we draw 
near Stratford. Any landscape in New England, even 
the tamest, has a more striking outline, and besides would 
have its blue eyes open in those lakelets that we encoun- 
ter almost from mile to mile at home, but of which the 
Old Country is utterly destitute ; or it would smile in our 
faces through the medium of the wayside brooks that 
vanish under a low stone arch on one side of the road, 
and sparkle out again on the other. Neither of these 
pretty features is often to be found in an English scene. 
The charm of the latter consists in the rich verdure of 
the fields, in the stately wayside trees and carefully kept 
plantations of wood, and in the old and high cultivation 
that has humanized the very sods by mingling so much 
of man's toil and care among them. To an American 
there is a kind of sanctity even in an English turnip- 
field, when he thinks how long that small square of 
ground has been known and recognized as a possession, 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 107 

transmitted from father to son, trodden often by memora- 
ble feet, and utterly redeemed from savagery by old ac- 
quaintanceship with civilized eyes. The wildest things 
in England are more than half tame. The trees, for 
instance, whether in hedge-row, park, or what they call 
forest, have nothing wild about them. They are never 
ragged ; there is a certain decorous restraint in the freest 
outspread of their branches, though they spread wider 
than any self-nurturing tree ; they are tall, vigorous, 
bulky, with a look of age-long life, and a promise of more 
years to come, all of wdiich will bring them into closer 
kindred with the race of man. Somebody or other has 
known them from the sapling upward ; and if they en- 
dure long enough, they grow to be traditionally observed 
and honored, and connected with the fortunes of old fami- 
lies, till, like Tennyson's Talking Oak, they babble with 
a thousand leafy tongues to ears that can understand 
them. 

An American tree, however, if it could grow in fair 
competition with an English one of similar species, would 
probably be the more picturesque object of the two. The. 
Warwickshire elm has not so beautiful a shape as those 
that overhang our village street ; and as for the redoubta- 
ble English oak, there is a certain John Bullism in its 
figure, a compact rotundity of foliage, a lack of irregular 
and various outline, that make it look wonderfully like a 
gigantic cauliflower. Its leaf, too, is much smaller than 
that of most varieties of American oak ; nor do I mean 
to doubt that the latter, with free leave to grow, reverent 
care and cultivation, and immunity from the axe, would 
live out its centuries as sturdily as its English brother, 
and prove far the nobler and more majestic specimen of 



108 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

a tree at the end of them. Still, however one's Yankee 
patriotism may struggle against the admission, it must be 
owned that the trees and other objects of an English 
landscape take hold of the observer by numberless minute 
tendrils, as it were, which, look as closely as we choose, 
we never find in an American scene. The parasitic 
growth is so luxuriant, that the trunk of the tree, so gray 
and dry in our climate, is better worth observing than 
the boughs and foliage ; a verdant mossiness coats it all 
over ; so that it looks almost as green as the leaves ; and 
often, moreover, the stately stem is clustered about, high 
upward, with creeping and twining shrubs, the ivy, and 
sometimes the mistletoe, close-clinging friends, nurtured 
by the moisture and never too fervid sunshine, and sup- 
porting themselves by the old tree's abundant strength. 
We call it a parasitical vegetation ; but, if the phrase 
imply any reproach, it is unkind to bestow it on this 
beautiful affection and relationship which exist in Eng- 
land between one order of plants and another : the strong 
tree being always ready to give support to the trailing 
shrub, lift it to the sun, and feed it out of its own heart, 
if it crave such food ; and the shrub, on its part, repaying 
its foster-father with an ample luxuriance of beauty, and 
adding Corinthian grace to the tree's lofty strength. No 
bitter winter nips these tender little sympathies, no hot 
sun burns the life out of them ; and therefore* they out- 
last the longevity of the oak, and, if the woodman per- 
mitted, would bury it in a green grave, when all is over. 
Should there be nothing else along the road to look at, 
an English hedge might well suffice to occupy the eyes, 
and, to a depth beyond what he would suppose, the heart 
of an American. "We often set out hedges in our own 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 109 

soil, but might as well: set out figs or pine-apples and ex- 
pect to gather fruit of them. Something grows, to be 
sure, which we choose to call a hedge ; but it lacks the 
dense, luxuriant variety of vegetation that is accumulated 
into the English original, in which a botanist would find 
a thousand shrubs and gracious herbs that the hedge- 
maker never thought of planting there. Among them, 
growing wild, are many of the kindred blossoms of the 
very flowers which our pilgrim fathers brought from Eng- 
land, for the sake of their simple beauty and home-like 
associations, and which we have ever since been cultivat- 
ing in gardens. There is not a softer trait to be found i 
in the character of those stern men than that they should 
have been sensible of these flower-roots clinging among 
the fibres of their rugged hearts, and have felt the neces- 
sity of bringing them over sea and making them heredi- 
tary in the new land, instead of trusting to what rarer 
beauty the wilderness might have in store for them. 

Or, if the roadside has no hedge, the ugliest stone 
fence (such as, in America, would keep itself bare and 
unsympathizing till the end of time) is sure to be covered 
with the small handiwork of Nature ; that careful mother 
lets nothing go naked there, and, if she cannot provide 
clothing, gives at least embroidery. No sooner is the 
fence built than she adopts and adorns it as a part of her * 
original plan, treating the hard, uncomely construction 
as if it had all along been a favorite idea of her own. A 
little sprig of ivy may be seen creeping up the side of 
the low wall and clinging fast with its many feet to the 
rough surface ; a tuft of grass roots itself between two of 
the stones, where a pinch or two of wayside dust has 
been moistened into nutritious soil for it ; a small bunch 



110 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

of fern grows in another crevice ; a deep, soft, verdant 
moss spreads itself along the top and over all the availa- 
ble inequalities of the fence ; and where nothing else will 
grow, lichens stick tenaciously to the bare stones and va- 
riegate the monotonous gray with hues of yellow and red. 
Finally, a great deal of shrubbery clusters along the base 
of the stone wall, and takes away the hardness of its out- 
line ; and in due time, as the upshot of these apparently 
aimless or sportive touches, we recognize that the benefi- 
cent Creator of all things, working through His hand- 
maiden whom we call Nature, has deigned to mingle a 
charm of divine gracefulness even with so earthly an in- 
stitution as a boundary fence. The clown who wrought 
at it little dreamed what fellow-laborer he had. 

The English should send us photographs of portions 
of the trunks of trees, the tangled and various products 
of a hedge, and a square foot of an old wall. They can 
hardly send anything else so characteristic. Their artists, 
especially of the later school, sometimes toil to depict 
such subjects, but are apt to stiffen the lithe tendrils in 
the process. The poets succeed better, with Tennyson 
at their head, and often produce ravishing effects by dint 
of a tender minuteness of touch, to which the genius of 
the soil and climate artfully impels them : for, as regards 
grandeur, there are loftier scenes in many countries than 
the best that England can show ; but, for the picturesque- 
ness of the smallest object that lies under its gentle 
gloom and sunshine, there is no scenery like it anywhere. 

In the foregoing paragraphs I have strayed away to a 
long distance from the road to Stratford-on-Avon ; for I 
remember no such stone fences as I have been speaking 
of in Warwickshire, nor elsewhere in England, except 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. Ill 

among the Lakes, or in Yorkshire, and the rough and 
hilly countries to the north of it. Hedges there were 
along my road, however, and broad, level fields, rustic 
hamlets, and cottages of ancient date, — from the roof of 
one of which the occupant was tearing away the thatch, 
and showing what an accumulation of dust, dirt, mouldi- 
ness, roots of weeds, families of mice, swallows' nests, and 
hordes of insects, had been deposited there since that old 
straw was new. Estimating its antiquity from these 
tokens, Shakspeare himself, in one of his morning ram- 
bles out of his native town, might have seen the thatch 
laid on ; at all events, the cottage-walls were old enough 
to have known him as a guest. A few modern villas 
were also to be seen, and perhaps there were mansions 
of old gentility at no great distance, but hidden among 
trees ; for it is a point of English pride that such houses 
seldom allow themselves to be visible from the high-road. 
In short, I recollect nothing specially remarkable along 
the way, nor in the immediate approach to Stratford; 
and yet the picture of that June morning has a glory in 
my memory, owing chiefly, I believe, to the charm of the 
English summer-weather, the really good days of which 
are the mos* delightful that mortal man can ever hope to 
be favored with. Such a genial warmth ! A little too 
warm, it might be, yet only to such a degree as to assure 
an American (a certainty to which he seldom attains till 
attempered to the customary austerity of an English sum- 
mer-day) that he was quite warm enough. And after 
all, there was an unconquerable freshness in the atmos- 
phere, which every little movement of a breeze shook 
over me like a dash of the ocean-spray. Such days 
need bring us no other happiness than their own light 



112 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

and temperature. No doubt, I could not have enjoyed it 
so exquisitely, except that there must be still latent in us 
Western wanderers (even after an absence of two cen- 
turies and more), an adaptation to the English climate 
which makes us sensible of a motherly kindness in its 
scantiest sunshine, and overflows us with delight at its 
more lavish smiles. 

The spire of Shakspeare's church — the Church of 
the Holy Trinity — begins to show itself among the trees 
at a little distance from Stratford. Next we see the 
shabby old dwellings, intermixed with mean-looking 
houses of modern date; and the streets being quite 
level, you are struck and surprised by nothing so much 
as the tameness of the general scene ; as if Shakspeare's 
genius were vivid enough to have wrought pictorial 
splendors in the town where he was born. Here and 
there, however, a queer edifice meets your eye, endowed 
with the individuality that belongs only to the domestic 
architecture of times gone by ; the house seems to have 
grown out of some odd quality in its inhabitant, as a sea- 
shell is moulded from within by the character of its 
inmate ; and having been built in a strange fashion, 
generations ago, it has ever since been growing stranger 
and quainter, as old humorists are apt to do. Here, too, 
(as so often impressed me in decayed English towns,) 
there appeared to be a greater abundance of aged people 
wearing small-clothes and leaning on sticks than you 
could Assemble on our side of the water by sounding a 
trumpet and proclaiming a reward for the most vener- 
able. I tried to account for this phenomenon by several 
theories : as, for example, that our new towns are un- 
wholesome for age and kill it off unseasonably ; or that 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 113 

our old men have a subtile sense of fitness, and die of 
their own accord rather than live in an unseemly contrast 
with youth and novelty : but the secret may be, after all, 
that hair-dyes, false teeth, modern arts of dress, and other 
contrivances of a skin-deep youthfulness, have not crept 
into these antiquated English towns, and so people grow 
old without the weary necessity of seeming younger than 
they are. 

After wandering through two or three streets, I found 
my way to Shakspeare's birthplace, which is almost a 
smaller and humbler house than any description can pre- 
pare the visitor to expect ; so inevitably does an august 
inhabitant make his abode palatial to our imaginations, 
receiving his guests, mdeed, in a castle in the air, until 
we unwisely insist on meeting him among the sordid 
lanes and alleys of lower earth. The portion of the edi- 
fice with winch Shakspeare had anything to do is hardly 
large enough, in the basement, to contain the butcher's 
stall that one of his descendants kept, and that still re- 
mains there, windowless, with the cleaver-cuts in its 
hacked counter, winch projects into the street under a 
little penthouse-roof, as if waiting for a new occupant. 

The upper half of the door was open, and, on my rap- 
ping at it, a young person in black made her appearance 
and admitted me : she was not a menial, but remarkably 
genteel (an American characteristic) for an English girl, 
and was probably the daughter of the old gentlewoman 
who takes care of the house. This lower room has a 
pavement of gray slabs of stone, which may have been 
rudely squared when the house was new, but are now all 
cracked, broken, and disarranged in a most unaccountable 
way. One does not see how any ordinary usage, for 



114 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

whatever length of time, should have so smashed these 
heavy stones ; it is as if an earthquake had burst up 
through the floor, which afterwards had been imperfectly 
trodden down again. The room is whitewashed and very 
clean, but wofully shabby and dingy, coarsely built, and 
such as the most poetical imagination would find it diffi- 
cult to idealize. In the rear of this apartment is the 
kitchen, a still smaller room, of a similar rude aspect ; it 
has a great, rough fireplace, with space for a large family 
under the blackened opening of the chimney, and an im- 
mense passage-way for the smoke, through which Shak- 
speare may have seen the blue sky by day and the stars 
glimmering down at him by night. It is now a dreary 
spot where the long-extinguished embers used to be. A 
glowing fire, even if it covered only a quarter part of 
the hearth, might still do much towards making the old 
kitchen cheerful. But we get a depressing idea of the 
stifled, poor, sombre kind of life that could have been 
lived in such a dwelling, where this room seems to have 
been the gathering-place of the family, with no breadth 
or scope, no good retirement, but old and young, huddling 
together cheek by jowl. What a hardy plant was Shak- 
speare's genius, how fatal its development, since it could 
not be blighted in such an atmosphere ! It only brought 
human nature the closer to him, and put more unctuous 
earth about his roots. 

Thence I was ushered up-stairs to the room in which 
Shakspeare is supposed to have been born ; though, if 
you peep too curiously into the matter, you may find the 
shadow of an ugly doubt on this, as well as most other 
points of his mysterious life. It is the chamber over the 
butcher's shop, and is lighted by one broad window con- 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 115 

taining a great many small, irregular panes of glass. 
The floor is made of plank?, very rudely hewn, and fit- 
ting together with little neatness ; the naked beams and 
rafters, at the sides of the room and overhead, bear the 
original marks of the builder's broad-axe, with no evi- 
dence of an attempt to smooth off the job. Again we 
have to reconcile ourselves to the smallness of the space 
enclosed by these illustrious walls, — a circumstance 
more difficult to accept, as regards places that we have 
heard, read, thought, and dreamed much about, than any 
other disenchanting particular of a mistaken ideal. A 
few paces — perhaps seven or eight — take us from end 
to end of it. So low it is, that I could easily touch the 
ceiling, and might have done so without a tiptoe-stretch, 
had it been a good deal higher ; and this humility of the 
chamber has tempted a vast multitude of people to write 
their names overhead in pencil. Every inch of the side- 
walls, even into the obscurest nooks and corners, is covered 
with a similar record ; all the window-panes, moreover, 
are scrawled with diamond signatures, among which is 
said to be that of Walter Scott; but so many persons 
have sought to immortalize themselves in close vicinity 
to his name that I really could not trace him out. Me- 
thinks it is strange that people do not strive to forget 
their forlorn little identities, in such situations, instead of 
thrusting them forward into the dazzle of a great renown, 
where, if noticed, they cannot but be deemed impertinent. 
This room, and the entire house, so far as I saw it, are 
whitewashed and exceedingly clean; nor is there the 
aged, musty smell with which old Chester first made 
me acquainted, and which goes far to cure an Ameri- 
can of his excessive predilection for antique residences. 



116 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

An old lady, who took charge of me up-stairs, had the 
manners and aspect of a gentlewoman, and talked with 
somewhat formidable knowledge and appreciative in- 
telligence about Shakspeare. Arranged on a table and 
in chairs were various prints, views of houses and scenes 
comiected with Shakspeare's memory, together with edi- 
tions of his works and local publications about his home 
and haunts, from the sale of which this respectable lady 
perhaps realizes a handsome profit. At any rate, I 
bought a good many of them, conceiving that it might 
be the civillest way of requiting her for her instructive 
conversation and the trouble she took hi showing me the 
house. It cost me a pang (not a curmudgeonly, but a 
gentlemanly one) to offer a downright fee to the lady- 
like girl who had admitted me ; but I swallowed my 
delicate scruples with some little difficulty, and she di- 
gested hers, so far as I could observe, with no difficulty 
at all. In fact, nobody need fear to hold out half a 
crown to any person with whom he has occasion to speak 
a word in England. 

I should consider it unfair to quit Shakspeare's house 
without the frank acknowledgment that I was conscious 
of not the slightest emotion while viewing it, nor any 
quickening of the imagination. This has often happened 
to me in my visits to memorable places. Whatever 
pretty and apposite "reflections I may have made upon 
the subject had either occurred to me before I ever saw 
Stratford, or have been elaborated since. It is pleasant, 
nevertheless, to think that I have seen the place ; and I 
believe that I can form a more sensible and vivid idea 
of Shakspeare as a flesh-and-blood individual now that 
I have stood on the kitchen-hearth and in the birth- 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 117 

chamber ; but I am not quite certain that this power of 
realization is altogether desirable in reference to a great 
poet. The Shakspeare whom I met there took various 
guises, but had not his laurel on. He was successively 
the roguish boy, — the youthful deer-stealer — the com- 
rade of players, — the too familiar friend of Davenant's 
mother, — the careful, thrifty, thriven man of property 
who came back from London to lend money on bond, and 
occupy the best house in Stratford, — the mellow, red- 
nosed, autumnal boon-companion of John a' Combe — and 
finally, (or else the Stratford gossips belied him,) the 
victim of convivial habits who met his death by tumbling 
into a ditch on his way home from a drinking-bout, and 
left his second-best bed to his poor wife. 

I feel, as sensibly as the reader can, what horrible im- 
piety it is to remember these things, be they true or false. 
In either case, they ought to vanish out of sight on the 
distant ocean-line of the past, leaving a pure, white mem- 
ory, even as a sail, though perhaps darkened with many 
stains, looks snowy white on the far horizon. But I 
draw a moral from these unworthy reminiscences and 
this embodiment of the poet, as suggested by some of 
the grimy actualities of his life. It is for the high in- 
terests of the world not to insist upon finding out that its 
greatest men are, in a certain lower sense, very much the 
same kind of men as the rest of us, and often a little 
worse ; because a common mind camiot properly digest 
such a discovery, nor ever know the true proportion of 
the great man's good and evil, nor how small a part 
of him it was that touched our muddy or dusty earth. 
Thence comes moral bewilderment, and even intellectual 
loss, in regard to what is best of him. When Shakspeare 



118 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

invoked a curse on the man who should stir his bones, he 
perhaps meant the larger share of it for him or them who 
should pry into his perishing earthliness, the defects or 
even the merits of the character that he wore in Strat- 
ford, when he had left mankind so much to muse upon 
that was imperishable and divine. Heaven keep me 
from incurring any part of the anathema in requital for 
the irreverent sentences above written ! 

From Shakspeare's house, the next step, of course, is 
to visit Ins burial-place. The appearance of the church 
is most venerable and beautiful, standing amid a great 
green shadow of lime-trees, above which rises the spire, 
while the Gothic battlements and buttresses and vast 
arched windows are obscurely seen through the boughs. 
The Avon loiters past the churchyard, an exceedingly 
sluggish river, which might seem to have been consider- 
ing which way it should flow ever since Shakspeare left 
off paddling in it and gathering the large forget-me-nots 
that grow among its flags and water-weeds. 

An old man in small-clothes was waiting at the gate ; 
and inquiring whether I wished to go in, he preceded me 
to the church-porch, and rapped. I could have done it 
quite as effectually for myself; but it seems, the old peo- 
ple of the neighborhood haunt about the churchyard, in 
spite of the frowns and remonstrances of the sexton, who 
grudges them the half-eleemosynary sixpence which they 
sometimes get from visitors. I was admitted into the 
church by a respectable-looking and intelligent man in 
black, the parish-clerk, I suppose, and probably holding a 
richer incumbency than his vicar, if all the fees which 
he handles remain in his own pocket. He was already 
exhibiting the Shakspeare monuments to two or three 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 119 

visitors, and several other parties came in while I was 
there. 

The poet and his family are in possession of what may be 
considered the very best burial-places that the church af- 
fords. They lie in a row, right across the breadth of the 
chancel, the foot of each gravestone being close to the ele- 
vated floor on which the alter stands. Nearest to the side- 
wall, beneath Shakspeare's bust, is a slab bearing a Latin 
inscription addressed to his wife, and covering her re- 
mains ; then his own slab, with the old anathematizing 
stanza upon it ; then that of Thomas Nash, who married 
his grand-daughter ; then that of Dr. Hall, the husband 
of his daughter Susannah ; and, lastly, Susannah's own. 
Shakspeare's is the commonest-looking slab of all, being 
just such a flag-stone as Essex Street in Salem used to 
be paved with, when I was a boy. Moreover, unless my 
eyes or recollection deceive me, there is a crack across 
it, as if it had already undergone some such violence as 
the inscription deprecates. Unlike the other monuments 
of the family, it bears no name, nor am I acquainted 
with the grounds or authority on which it is absolutely 
determined to be Shakspeare's ; although, being in a 
range with those of his wife and children, it might 
naturally be attributed to him. But, then, why does Ins 
wife, who died afterwards, take precedence of him and 
occupy the place next his bust? And where are the 
graves of another daughter and a son, who have a better 
right in the family-row than Thomas Nash, his grand- 
son-in-law ? Might not one or both of them have been 
laid under the nameless stone ? But it is dangerous 
trifling with Shakspeare's dust ; so I forbear to meddle 
further with the grave, (though the prohibition makes it 



120 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

tempting,) and shall let whatever bones be in it rest in 
peace. Yet I must needs add that the inscription on the 
bust seems to imply that Shakspeare's grave was directly 
underneath it. 

The poet's bust is affixed to the northern wall of the 
church, the base of it being about a man's height, or 
rather more, above the floor of the chancel. The fea- 
tures of this piece of sculpture are entirely unlike any 
portrait of Shakspeare that I have ever seen, and compel 
me to take down the beautiful, lofty-browed, and noble 
picture of him which has hitherto hung in my mental 
portrait gallery. The bust cannot be said to represent a 
beautiful face or an eminently noble head ; but it clutches 
firmly hold of one's sense of reality and insists upon your 
accepting it, if not as Shakspeare the poet, yet as the 
wealthy burgher of Stratford, the friend of John J 
Combe, who lies yonder in the corner. I know not wh 
the phrenologists say to the bust. The forehead is but 
moderately developed, and retreats somewhat, the uppa. 
part of the skull rising pyramidally ; the eyes are prom- 
inent almost beyond the penthouse of the brow ; the 
upper lip is so long that it must have been almost a 
deformity, unless the sculptor artistically exaggerated its 
length, in consideration, that, on the pedestal, it must be 
foreshortened by being looked at from below. On the 
whole, Shakspeare must have had a singular rather than 
a prepossessing face ; and it is wonderful how, with this 
bust before its eyes, the world has persisted in maintain- 
ing an erroneous notion of his appearance, allowing paint- 
ers and sculptors to foist their idealized nonsense on us 
all, instead of the genuine man. For my part, the Shak- 
speare of my mind's eye is henceforth to be a personage 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 121 

of a ruddy English complexion, with a reasonably capa- 
cious brow, intelligent and quickly observant eyes, a nose 
curved slightly outward, a long, queer upper-lip, with 
the mouth a little unclosed beneath it, and cheeks con- 
siderably developed in the lower part and beneath the 
chin. But when Shakspeare was himself, (for nine-tenths 
of the time, according to all appearances, he was but the 
burgher of Stratford,) he doubtless shone through this 
dull mask and transfigured it into the face of an aneel. 
Fifteen or twenty feet behind the row of Shakspeare 
gravestones is the great east-window of the church, now 
brilliant with stained glass of recent manufacture. On 
one side of this window, under a sculptured arch of 
marble, lies a full-length marble figure of John a' Combe, 
•lad in what I take to be a robe of municipal dignity, and 
molding its hands devoutly clasped. It is a sturdy Eng- 
lish figure, with coarse features, a type of ordinary man 
whom we smile to see immortalized in the sculpturesque 
material of poets and heroes ; but the prayerful attitude 
encourages us to believe that the old usurer may not, 
after all, have had that grim reception in the other world 
which Shakspeare's squib foreboded for him. By-the-by, 
till I grew somewhat familiar with Warwickshire pro- 
nunciation, I never understood that the point of those 
ill-natured lines was a pun. " ' Oho ! ' quoth the Devil, 
' 't is my John a' Combe ! '" — that is, " My John has 



come 



Close to the poet's bust is a nameless, oblong, cubic 
tomb, supposed to be that of a clerical dignitary of the 
fourteenth century. The church has other mural monu- 
ments and altar tombs, one or two of the latter uphold- 
ing the recumbent figures of knights in armor and their 



122 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

dames, very eminent and worshipful personages in their 
day, no doubt, but doomed to appear forever intrusive 
and impertinent within the precincts which Shakspeare 
has made his own. His renown is tyrannous, and suffers 
nothing else to be recognized within the scope of its 
material presence, unless illuminated by some side-ray 
from himself. The clerk informed me that interments 
no longer take place in any part of the church. And it 
is better so ; for methinks a person of delicate individu- 
ality, curious about his burial-place, and desirous of six 
feet of earth for himself alone, could never endure to lie 
buried near Shakspeare, but would rise up at midnight 
and grope his way out of the church-door, rather than 
sleep in the shadow of so stupendous a memory. 

I should hardly have dared to add another to the innu- 
merable descriptions of Stratford-on-Avon, if it had not 
seemed to me that this would form a fitting framework 
to some reminiscences of a very remarkable womau. 
Her labor, while she lived, was of a nature and purpose 
outwardly irreverent to the name of Shakspeare, yet, by 
its actual tendency, entitling her to the distinction of being 
that one of all his worshippers who sought, though she 
knew it not, to place the richest and stateliest diadem 
upon his brow. We Americans, at least, in the scanty 
annals of our literature, cannot afford to forget her high 
and conscientious exercise of noble faculties, which, in- 
deed, if you look at the matter in one way, evolved only 
a miserable error, but, more fairly considered, produced a 
result worth almost what it cost her. Her faith in her 
own ideas was so genuine, that, erroneous as they were, 
it transmuted them to gold, or, at all events, interfused a 
large proportion of that precious and indestructible sub- 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 123 

stance among the waste material from which it can read- 
ily be sifted. 

The only time I ever saw Miss Bacon was in London, 
where she had lodgings in Spring Street, Sussex Gar- 
dens, at the house of a grocer, a portly, middle-aged, 
civil, and friendly man, who, as well as his wife, appeared 
to feel a personal kindness towards their lodger. I was 
ushered up two (and I rather believe three) pair of stairs 
into a parlor somewhat humbly furnished, and told that 
Miss Bacon would come soon. There were a number of 
books on the table, and, looking into them, I found that 
every one had some reference, more or less immediate, 
to her Shakspearian theory, — a volume of Raleigh's 
" History of the World," a volume of Montaigne, a 
volume of Lord Bacon's letters, a volume of Shak- 
speare's plays ; and on another table lay a large roll of 
manuscript, which I presume to have been a portion of 
her work. To be sure, there was a pocket-Bible among 
the books, but everything else referred to the one des- 
potic idea that had got possession of her mind ; and- as it 
had engrossed her whole soul as well as her intellect, I 
have no doubt that she had established subtile connec- 
tions between it and the Bible likewise. As is apt to be 
the case with solitary students, Miss Bacon probably read 
late and rose late ; for I took up Montaigne (it was Haz- 
litt's translation) and had been reading his journey to 
Italy a good while before she appeared. 

I had expected (the more shame for me, having no 
other ground of such expectation than that she was a 
literary woman) to see a very homely, uncouth, elderly 
personage, and was quite agreeably disappointed by her 
aspect. She was rather uncommonly tall, and had a 



124 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

striking and expressive face, dark hair, dark eyes, which 
shone with an inward light as soon as she began to speak, 
and by-and-by a color came into her cheeks and made 
her look almost young. Not that she really was so ; she 
must have been beyond middle-age: and there was no 
unkindness in coming to that conclusion, because, making 
allowance for years and ill-health, I could suppose her to 
have been handsome and exceedingly attractive once. 
Though wholly estranged from society, there was little 
or no restraint or embarrassment in her manner : lonely 
people are generally glad to give utterance to their pent- 
up ideas, and often bubble over with them as freely as 
children with their new-found syllables. I cannot tell 
how it came about, but we immediately found ourselves 
taking a friendly and familiar tone together, and began 
to talk as if we had known one another a very long while. 
A little preliminary correspondence had indeed smoothed 
the way, and we had a definite topic in the contemplated 
publication of her book. 

She was very communicative about her theory, and 
would have been much more so had I desired it ; but, 
being conscious within myself of a sturdy unbelief, I 
deemed it fair and honest rather to repress than draw 
her out upon the subject. Unquestionably, she was a 
monomaniac ; these overmastering ideas about the au- 
thorship of Shakspeare's plays, and the deep political 
philosophy concealed beneath the surface of them, had 
completely thrown her off her balance ; but at the same 
time they had wonderfully developed her intellect, and 
made her what she could not otherwise have become. It 
was a very singular phenomenon : a system of philosophy 
growing up in this woman's mind without her volition, — 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 125 

contrary, in fact, to the determined resistance of her voli- 
tion, — and substituting itself in the place of everything' 
that originally grew there. To have based such a sys- 
tem on fancy, and unconsciously elaborated it for herself, 
was almost as wonderful as really to have found it in the 
plays. But, in a certain sense, she did actually find it 
there. Shakspeare has surface beneath surface, to an 
immeasurable depth, adapted to the plummet-line of 
every reader ; his works present many phases of truth, 
each with scope large enough to fill a contemplative 
mind. Whatever you seek in him you will surely dis- 
cover, provided you seek truth. There is no exhausting 
the various interpretation of his symbols ; and a thousand 
years hence, a world of new readers will possess a whole 
library of new books, as we ourselves do, in these vol- 
umes old already. I had half a mind to suggest to Miss 
Bacoh this explanation of her theory, but forbore, be- 
cause (as I could readily perceive) she had as princely 
a spirit as Queen Elizabeth herself, and would at once 
have motioned me from the room. 

I had heard, long ago, that she believed that the ma- 
terial evidences of her dogma as to the authorship, to- 
gether with the key of the new philosophy, would be 
found buried in Shakspeare's grave. Recently, as I 
understood her, this notion had been somewhat modified, 
and was now accurately defined and fully developed in 
her mind, with a result of perfect certainty. In Lord 
Bacon's letters, on which she laid her finger as she 
spoke, she had discovered the key and clue to the whole 
mystery. There were definite and minute instructions 
how to find a will and other documents relating to the 
conclave of Elizabethan philosophers, which were con- 



126 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

ceaJed (when and by whom she did not inform me) in a 
hollow space in the under surface of Shakspeare's grave- 
stone. Thus the terrible prohibition to remove the stone 
was accounted for. The directions, she intimated, went 
completely and precisely to the point, obviating all diffi- 
culties in the way of coming at the treasure, and even, 
if I remember right, were so contrived as to ward off 
any troublesome consequences likely to ensue from 
the interference of the parish-officers. All that Miss 
Bacon now remained in England for — indeed, the object 
for which she had come hither, and which had kept her 
here for three years past — was to obtain possession of 
these material and unquestionable proofs of the authen- 
ticity of her theory. 

She communicated all this strange matter in a low, 
quiet tone ; while, on my part, I listened as quietly, and 
without any expression of dissent. Controversy against 
a faith so settled would have shut her up at once, and 
that, too, without in the least weakening her belief in the 
existence of those treasures of the tomb ; and had it been 
possible to convince her of their intangible nature, I ap- 
prehend that there would have been nothing left for the 
poor enthusiast save to collapse and die. She frankly 
confessed that she could no longer bear the society of 
those who did not at least lend a certain sympathy to her 
views, if not fully share in them ; and meeting little sym- 
pathy or none, she had now entirely secluded herself 
from the world. In all these years, she had seen Mrs. 
Farrar a few times, but had long ago given her up, — 
Carlyle once or twice, but not of late, although he had 
received her kindly; Mr. Buchanan, while minister in 
England, had once called on her, and General Campbell, 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 127 

our Consul in London, had met her two or three times on 
business. With the^e exceptions which she marked so 
scrupulously that it was perceptible what epochs they 
were in the monotonous passage of her days, she had 
lived in the profoundest solitude. She never walked 
out ; she suffered much from ill-health ; and yet, she 
assured me, she was perfectly happy. 

I could well conceive it ; for Miss Bacon imagined 
herself to have received (what is certainly the greatest 
boon ever assigned to mortals) a high mission in the 
world, with adequate powers for its accomplishment ; and 
lest even these should prove insufficient, she had faith 
that special interpositions of Providence were forwarding 
her human efforts. This idea was continually coming to 
the surface, during our interview. She believed, for 
example, that she had been providentially led to her 
lodging-house and put in relations with the good-natured 
grocer and his family ; and, to say the truth, considering 
what a savage and stealthy tribe the London lodging- 
house keepers usually are, the honest kindness of this 
man and his household appeared to have been little less 
than miraculous. Evidently, too, she thought that Prov- 
idence had brought me forward — a man somewhat con- 
nected with literature — at the critical juncture when 
she needed a negotiator with the booksellers ; and, on 
my part, though little accustomed to regard myself as a 
divine minister, and though I might even have preferred 
that Providence should select some other instrument, I 
had no scruple in undertaking to do what I could for her 
Her book, as I could see by turning it over, was a very 
remarkable one, and worthy of being offered to the pub- 
lic, which, if wise enough to appreciate it, would be 



128 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

thankful for what was good in it and merciful to its 
faults. It was founded on a prodigious error, but was 
built up from that foundation with a good many prodig- 
ious truths. And, at all events, whether I could aid her 
literary views or no, it would have been both rash and 
impertinent in me to attempt drawing poor Miss Bacon 
out of her delusions, which were the condition on which 
she lived in comfort and joy, and in the exercise of great 
intellectual power. So I left her to dream as she pleased 
about the treasures of Shakspeare's tombstone, and to 
form whatever designs might seem good to herself for 
obtaining possession of them. I was sensible of a lady- 
like feeling of propriety in Miss Bacon, and a New- 
England orderliness in her character, and, in spite of her 
bewilderment, a sturdy common-sense, which I trusted 
would begin to operate at the right time, and keep her 
from any actual extravagance. And as regarded this 
matter of the tombstone, so it proved. 

The interview lasted above an hour, during which she 
flowed out freely, as to the sole auditor, capable of any 
degree of intelligent sympathy, whom she had met with 
in a very long while. Her conversation was remarkably 
suggestive, alluring forth one's own ideas and fantasies 
from the shy places where they usually haunt. She was 
indeed an admirable talker, considering how long she 
had held her tongue for lack of a listener, — pleasant, 
sunny and shadowy, often piquant, and giving glimpses 
of all a woman's various and readily changeable moods 
and humors ; and beneath them all there ran a deep and 
powerful under-current of earnestness, which did not fail 
to produce in the listener's mind something like a tem- 
porary faith in what she herself believed so fervently. 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 129 

But the streets of London are not favorable to enthusi- 
asms of this kind, nor, in fact, are they likely to flourish 
anywhere in the English atmosphere ; so that, long be- 
fore reaching Paternoster Row, I felt that it would be a 
difficult and doubtful matter to advocate the publication 
of Miss Bacon's book. Nevertheless, it did finally get 
published. 

Months before that happened, however, Miss Bacon 
had taken up her residence at Stratford-on-Avon, drawn 
thither by the magnetism of those rich secrets which she 
supposed to have been hidden by Raleigh, or Bacon, or I 
know not whom, in Shakspeare's grave, and protected 
there by a curse, as pirates used to bury their gold in 
the guardianship of a fiend. She took a humble lodging 
and began to haunt the church like a ghost. But she 
did not condescend to any stratagem or underhand at- 
tempt to violate the grave, which, had she been capable 
of admitting such an idea, might possibly have been ac- 
complished by the aid of a resurrection-man. As her 
first step, she made acquaintance with the clerk, and be- 
gan to sound him as to the feasibility of her enterprise 
and his own willingness to engage in it. The clerk ap- 
parently listened with not unfavorable ears ; but, as his 
situation (which the fees of pilgrims, more numerous 
than at any Catholic shrine, render lucrative) would 
have been forfeited by any malfeasance in office, he 
stipulated for liberty to consult the vicar. Miss Bacon 
requested to tell her own story to the reverend gentle- 
man, and seems to have been received by him with the 
utmost kindness, and even to have succeeded in making 
a certain impression on his mind as to the desirability of 
the search. As their interview had been under the seal 
9 



130 KECOLLLCTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

of secrecy, he asked permission to consult a friend, who, as 
Miss Bacon either found out or surmised, was a prac- 
titioner of the law. What the legal friend advised she 
did not learn ; but the negotiation continued, and cer- 
tainly was never broken off by an absolute refusal on the 
vicar's part. He, perhaps, was kindly temporizing with 
our poor countrywoman, whom an Englishman of ordi- 
nary mould would have sent to a lunatic asylum at 
once. I camiot help fancying, however, that her fa- 
miliarity with the events of Shakspeare's life, and of his 
death and burial, (of which she would speak as if she 
had been present at the edge of the grave,) and all the 
history, literature, and personalities of the Elizabethan 
age, together with the prevailing power of her own belief, 
and the eloquence with which she knew how to enforce it, 
had really gone some little way toward making a con- 
vert of the good clergyman. If so, I honor hiin above 
all the hierarchy of England. 

The affair certainly looked very hopeful. Plowever 
erroneously, Miss Bacon had understood from the vicar 
that no obstacles would be interposed to the investiga- 
tion, and that he himself would sanction it with his pres- 
ence. It was to take place after nightfall ; and all pre- 
liminary arrangements being made, the vicar and clerk 
professed to wait only her word in order to set about 
lifting the awful stone from the sepulchre. So, at least, 
Miss Bacon believed ; and as her bewilderment was en- 
tirely in her own thoughts, and never disturbed her per- 
ception or accurate remembrance of external things, I 
see no reason to doubt it, except it be the tinge of ab- 
surdity in the fact. But, in this apparently prosperous 
state of things, her own convictions began to falter. A 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 131 

doubt stole into her mind whether she might not have 
mistaken the depository and mode of concealment of 
those historic treasures; and after once admitting the 
doubt, she was afraid to hazard the shock of uplifting 
the stone and finding nothing. She examined the 
surface of the gravestone, and endeavored, without 
stirring it, to estimate whether it were of such thick- 
ness as to be capable of containing the archives of 
the Elizabethan club. She went over anew the proofs, 
the clues, the enigmas, the pregnant sentences, which she 
had discovered in Bacon's letters and elsewhere, and 
now was frightened to perceive that they did not point 
so definitely to Shakspeare's tomb as she had hereto- 
fore supposed. There was an unmistakably distinct ref- 
erence to a tomb, but it might be Bacon's, or Raleigh's, 
or Spenser's ; and instead of the " Old Player," as 
she profanely called him, it might be either of those 
three illustrious dead, poet, warrior, or statesman, whose 
ashes, in Westminster Abbey, or the Tower burial- 
ground, or wherever they sleep, it was her mission to dis- 
turb. It is very possible, moreover, that her acute mind 
may always have had a lurking and deeply latent dis- 
trust of its own fantasies, and that this now became 
strong enough to restrain her from a decisive step. 

But she continued to -hover around the church, and 
seems to have had full freedom of entrance in the day- 
time, and special license, on one occasion at least, at a 
late hour of the night. She went thither with a dark- 
lantern, which could but twinkle like a glow-worm 
through the volume of obscurity that filled the great 
dusky edifice. Groping her wav up the aisle and tow- 
ards the chancel, she sat down on the elevated part of 



132 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

the pavement above Shakspeare's grave. If the divine 
poet really wrote the inscription there, and cared as much 
about the quiet of his bones as its deprecatory earnest- 
ness would imply, it was time for those crumbling relics 
to bestir themselves under her sacrilegious feet. But 
they were safe. She made no attempt to disturb them ; 
though, I believe, she looked narrowly into the crevices 
between Shakspeare's and the two adjacent stones, and in 
some way satisfied herself that her single strength would 
suffice to lift the former, in case of need. She threw the 
feeble ray of her lantern up towards the bust, but could 
not make it visible beneath the darkness of the vaulted 
roof. Had she been subject to superstitious terrors, it is 
impossible to conceive of a situation that could better 
entitle her to feel them, for, if Shakspeare's ghost would 
rise at any provocation, it must have shown itself then ; 
but it is my sincere belief, that, if his figure had ap- 
peared within the scope of her dark-lantern, in his slashed 
doublet and gown, and with his eyes bent on her beneath 
the high, bald forehead, just as we see him in the bust, 
she would have met him fearlessly and controverted his 
claims to the authorship of the plays, to his very face. 
She had taught herself to contemn " Lord Leicester's 
groom" (it was one of her disdainful epithets for the 
world's incomparable poet) so thoroughly, that even his 
disembodied spirit would hardly have found civil treat- 
ment at Miss Bacon's hands. 

Her vigil, though it appears to have had no definite 
object, continued far into the night. Several times she 
heard a low movement in the aisles : a stealthy, dubious 
foot-fall prowling about in the darkness, now here, now 
there, among the pillars and ancient tombs, as if some 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 133 

restless inhabitant of the latter had crept forth to peep 
at the intruder. By-and-by the clerk made his appear- 
ance, and confessed that he had been watching her ever 
since she entered the church. 

About this time it was that a strange sort of weariness 
seems to have fallen upon her : her toil was all but done, 
her great purpose, as she believed, on the very point of 
accomplishment, when she began to regret that so stu- 
pendous a mission had been imposed on the fragility of a 
woman. Her faith in the new philosophy was as mighty 
as ever, and so was her confidence in her own adequate 
development of it, now about to be given to the world ; 
yet she wished, or fancied so, that it might never have 
been her duty to achieve this unparalleled task, and to 
stagger feebly forward under her immense burden of re- 
sponsibility and renown. So far as her personal concern 
in the matter went, she would gladly have forfeited the 
reward of her patient study and labor for so many years, 
her exile from her country and estrangement from her 
family and friends, her sacrifice of health and all other 
interests to this one pursuit, if she could only find her- 
self free to dwell in Stratford and be forgotten. She 
liked the old slumberous town, and awarded the only 
praise that ever I knew her to bestow on Shakspeare, the 
individual man, by acknowledging that his taste in a resi- 
dence was good, and that he knew how to choose a suit- 
able retirement for a person of shy, but genial tempera- 
ment. And at this point, I cease to possess the means 
of tracing her vicissitudes of feeling any farther. In 
consequence of some advice which I fancied it my duty to 
tender, as being the only confidant whom she now had in 
the world, I fell under Miss Bacon's most severe and 



134 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

passionate displeasure, and was cast off by her in the 
twinkling of an eye. It was a misfortune to which her 
friends were always particularly liable ; but I think that 
none of them ever loved, or even respected, her most 
ingenuous and noble, but likewise most sensitive and 
tumultuous character, the less for it. 

At that time her book was passing through the press. 
Without prejudice to her literary ability, it must be 
allowed that Miss Bacon was wholly unfit to prepare her 
own work for publication, because, among many other 
reasons, she was too thoroughly in earnest to know what 
to leave out. Every leaf and line was sacred, for all 
had been written under so deep a conviction of truth as 
to assume, in her eyes, the aspect of inspiration. A prac- 
tised book-maker, with entire control of her materials, 
would have shaped out a duodecimo volume full of elo- 
quent and ingenious dissertation, — criticisms which quite 
take the color and pungency out of other people's critical 
remarks on Shakspeare, — philosophic truths which she 
imagined herself to have found at the roots of his concep- 
tions, and which certainly come from no inconsiderable 
depth somewhere. There was a great amount of rubbish, 
which any competent editor would have shovelled out of 
the way. But Miss Bacon thrust the whole bulk of in- 
spiration and nonsense into the press in a lump, and there 
tumbled out a ponderous octavo volume, which fell with 
a dead thump at the feet of the public, and has never 
been picked up. A few persons turned over one or two 
of the leaves, as it lay there, and essayed to kick the vol- 
ume deeper into the mud ; for they were the hack critics 
of the minor periodical press in London, than whom, I 
suppose, though excellent fellows in their way, there are 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 135 

no gentlemen in the world less sensible of any sanctity in 
a book, or less likely to recognize an author's heart in it, 
or more utterly careless about bruising, if they do recog- 
nize it. It is their trade. They could not do otherwise. 
I never thought of blaming them. It was not for such 
an Englishman as one of these to get beyond the idea 
that an assault was meditated on England's greatest poet. 
From the scholars and critics of her own country, indeed, 
Miss Bacon might have looked for a worthier apprecia- 
tion, because many of the best of them have higher culti- 
vation, and finer and deeper literary sensibilities than all 
but the very profoundest and brightest of Englishmen. 
But they are not a courageous body of men ; they dare 
not think a truth that has an odor of absurdity, lest they 
should feel themselves bound to speak it out. If any 
American ever wrote a word in her behalf, Miss Bacon 
never knew it, nor did I. Our journalists at once repub- 
lished some of the most brutal vituperations of the Eng- 
lish press, thus pelting their poor countrywoman with 
stolen mud, without even waiting to know whether the 
ignominy was deserved. And they never have known it, 
to this day, nor ever will. 

The next intelligence that I had of Miss Bacon was 
by a letter from the mayor of Stratford-on-Avon. He 
was a medical man, and wrote both in his official and 
professional character, telling me that an American lady, 
who had recently published what the mayor called a 
" Shakspeare book," was afflicted with insanity. In a 
lucid interval she had referred to me, as a person who 
had some knowledge of her family and affairs. What 
she may have suffered before her intellect gave way, 
we had better not try to imagine. No author had ever 



136 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

hoped so confidently as she ; none ever failed more ut- 
terly. A superstitious fancy might suggest that the 
anathema on Shakspeare's tombstone had fallen heavily 
on her head in requital of even the unaccomplished pur- 
pose of disturbing the dust beneath, and that the " Old 
Player" had kept so quietly in his grave, on the night of 
her vigil, because he foresaw how soon and terribly he 
would be avenged. But if that benign spirit takes any 
care or cognizance of such things now, he has surely re- 
quited the injustice that she sought to do him — the high 
justice that she really did — by a tenderness of love and 
pity of which only he could be capable. What matters 
it, though she called him by some other name ? He had 
wrought a greater miracle on her than on all the world 
besides. This bewildered enthusiast had recognized a • 
depth in the man whom she decried, which scholars, 
critics, and learned societies, devoted to the elucidation 
of his unrivalled scenes, had never imagined to exist 
there. She had paid him the loftiest honor that all these 
ages of renown have been able to accumulate upon his 
memory. And when, not many months after the out- 
ward failure of her lifelong object, she passed into the 
better world, I know not why we should hesitate to be- 
lieve that the immortal poet may have met her on the 
threshold and led her in, reassuring her with friendly and 
comfortable words, and thanking her (yet with a smile 
of gentle humor in his eyes at the thought of certain 
mistaken speculations) for having interpreted him to 
mankind so well. 

I believe that it has been the fate of this remarkable 
book never to have had more than a single reader. I 
myself am acquainted with it only in insulated chapters 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 137 

and scattered pages and paragraphs. But, since my re- 
turn to America, a young man of genius and enthusiasm 
has assured me that he has positively read the book from 
beginning to end, and is completely a convert to its doc- 
trines. It belongs to him, therefore, and not to me, — 
whom, in almost the last letter that I received from her, 
she declared unworthy to meddle with her work, — it 
belongs surely to this one individual, who has done her 
so much justice as to know what she wrote, to place Miss 
Bacon in her due position before the public and posterity. 
This has been too sad a story. To lighten the recol- 
lection of it, I will think of my stroll homeward past 
Charlecote Park, where I beheld the most stately elms, 
singly, in clumps, and in groves, scattered all about in 
the sunniest, shadiest, sleepiest fashion ; so that I could 
not but believe in a lengthened, loitering, drowsy enjoy- 
ment which these trees must have in their existence. 
Diffused over slow-paced centuries, it need not be keen 
nor bubble into thrills and ecstasies, like the momentary 
delights of short-lived human beings. They were civil- 
ized trees, known to man and befriended by him for ages 
past. There is an indescribable difference — as I believe 
I have heretofore endeavored to express — between the 
tamed, but by no means effete (on the contrary, the 
richer and more luxuriant) Nature of England, and the 
rude, shaggy, barbarous Nature which offers us its racier 
companionship in America. No less a change has been 
wrought among the wildest creatures that inhabit what 
the English call their forests. By-and-by, among those 
refined and venerable trees, I saw a large herd of deer, 
mostly reclining, but some standing in picturesque groups, 
while the stags threw their large antlers aloft, as if they 



138 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

had been taught to make themselves tributary to the 
scenic effect. Some were running fleetly about, vanish- 
ing from light into shadow and glancing forth again, with 
here and there a little fawn careering at its mother's 
heels. These deer are almost in the same relation to 
the wild, natural state of their kind that the trees of an 
English park hold to the rugged growth of an American 
forest. They have held a certain intercourse with man 
for immemorial years ; and, most probably, the stag that 
Shakspeare killed was one of the progenitors of this very 
herd, and may himself have been a partly civilized and 
humanized deer, though in a less degree than these re- 
mote posterity. They are a little wilder than sheep, but 
they do not snuff the air at the approach of human 
beings, nor evince much alarm at their pretty close 
proximity; although if you continue to advance, they 
toss their heads and take to their heels in a kind of 
mimic terror, or something akin to feminine skittishness, 
with a dim remembrance or tradition, as it were, of their 
having come of a wild stock. They have so long been 
fed and protected by man, that they must have lost many 
of their native instincts, and, I suppose, could not live 
comfortably through even an English winter without 
human help. One is sensible of a gentle scorn at them 
for such dependency, but feels none the less kindly dis- 
posed towards the half-domesticated race ; and it may 
have been his observation of these tamer characteristics 
in the Charlecote herd that suggested to Shakspeare the 
tender and pitiful description of a wounded stag, in " As 
You Like It." 

At a distance of some hundreds of yards from Charle- 
cote Hall, and almost hidden by the trees between it and 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 139 

the roadside, is an old brick archway and porter's lodge. 
In connection with this entrance there appears to have 
been a wall and an ancient moat, the latter of which is 
still visible, a shallow, grassy scoop along the base of an 
embankment of the lawn. About fifty yards within the 
gateway stands the house, forming three sides of a square, 
with three gables in a row on the front, and on each of 
the two wings ; and there are several towers and turrets 
at the angles, together with projecting windows, antique 
balconies, and other quaint ornaments suitable to the half- 
Gothic taste in which the edifice was built. Over the 
gateway is the Lucy coat-of-arms, emblazoned in its 
proper colors. The mansion dates from the early days 
of Elizabeth, and probably looked very much the same 
as now when Shakspeare was brought before Sir Thomas 
Lucy for outrages among his deer. The impression is 
not that of gray antiquity, but of stable and time-honored 
gentility, still as vital as ever. 

It is a most delightful place. All about the house and 
domain there is a perfection of comfort and domestic 
taste, an amplitude of convenience, which could have 
been brought about only by the slow ingenuity and labor 
of many successive generations, intent upon adding all 
possible improvement to the home where years gone by 
and years to come give a sort of permanence to the in- 
tangible present. An American is sometimes tempted 
to fancy that only by this long process can real homes be 
produced. One man's lifetime is not enough for the ac- 
complishment of such a work of Art and Nature, almost 
the greatest merely temporary one that is confided to 
him; too little, at any rate, — yet perhaps too long 
when he is discouraged by the idea that he must make 



140 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. 

his house warm and delightful for a miscellaneous race 
of successors, of whom the one thing certain is, that his 
own grandchildren will not be among them. Such re- 
pinings as are here suggested, however, come only from 
the fact, that, bred in English habits of thought, as most 
of us are, we have not -yet modified our instincts to the 
necessities of our new forms of life. A lodging in a wig- 
wam or under a tent has really as many advantages, 
when we come to know them, as a home beneath the 
roof-tree of Charlecote Hall. But, alas ! our philosophers 
have not yet taught us what is best, nor have our poets 
sung us what is beautifullest, in the kind of life that we 
must lead ; and therefore we still read the old English 
wisdom, and harp upon the ancient strings. And thence 
it happens, that, when we look at a time-honored hall, it 
seems more possible for men who inherit such a home, 
than for ourselves, to lead noble and graceful lives, 
quietly doing good and lovely things as their daily 
work, and achieving deeds of simple greatness when 
circumstances require them. I sometimes apprehend 
that our institutions may perish before we shall have 
discovered the most precious of the possibilities which 
they involve. 



LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 

After my first visit to Leamington Spa, I went by 
an indirect route to Lichfield, and put up at the Black 
Swan. Had I known where to find it, I would much 
rather have established myself at the inn formerly kept 
by the worthy Mr. Boniface, so famous for his ale in 
Farquhar's time. The Black Swan is an old-fashioned 
hotel, its sTreet-front being penetrated by an arched pas- 
sage, in either ^ide of which is an entrance-door to the 
different parts of the house, and through which, and over 
the large stones of its pavement, all vehicles and horse- 
men rumble and clatter into an enclosed court-yard, with 
a thunderous uproar among the contiguous rooms and 
chambers. I appeared to be the only guest of the spa- 
cious establishment, but may have had a few fellow-lodgers 
hidden in their separate parlors, and utterly eschewing 
that community of interests which is the characteristic 
feature of life in an American hotel. At any rate, I had 
the great, dull; dingy, and dreary coffee-room, with its 
heavy old mahogany chairs and tables, all to myself, and 
not a soul to exchange a word with, except the waiter, 
who, like most of his class in England, had evidently 
left his conversational abilities uncultivated. No former 
practice of solitary living, nor habits of reticence, nor 
w r ell-tested self-dependence for occupation of mind and 



142 LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 

amusement, can quite avail, as I now proved, to dissipate 
the ponderous gloom of an English coffee-room under 
such circumstances as these, with no book at hand save 
the county-directory, nor any newspaper but a torn local 
journal of five days ago. So I buried myself, betimes, in 
a huge heap of ancient feathers, (there is no other kind of 
bed in these old inns,) let my head sink into an unsub- 
stantial pillow, and slept a stifled sleep, infested with 
such a fragmentary confusion of dreams that I took them 
to be a medley, compounded of the night-troubles of all 
my predecessors in that same unrestful couch. And 
when I awoke, the musty odor of a by-gone century 
was in my nostrils — a faint, elusive smell, of which I 
never had any conception before crossing the Atlantic. 
In the morning, after a mutton-chop and a cup of chic- 
cory in the .dusky coffee-room, I went forth and bewildered 
myself a little while among the crooked streets, in quest 
of one or two objects that had chiefly attracted me to the 
spot. The city is of very ancient date, and its name in 
the old Saxon tongue, has a dismal import that would 
apply well, in these days and forever henceforward, to 
many an unhappy locality in our native land. Lichfield 
signifies " The Field of the Dead Bodies " — an epithet, 
however, Avhich the town did not assume in remembrance 
of a battle, but which probably sprung up by a natural 
process, like a sprig of rue or other funereal weed, out of 
the graves of two princely brothers, sons of a pagan king 
of Mercia, who were converted by Saint Chad, and after- 
wards martyred for their Christian faith. Nevertheless, 
I was but little interested in the legends of the remote 
antiquity of Lichfield, being drawn thither partly to see 
its beautiful cathedral, and still more, I believe, because 



LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 143 

it was the birthplace of Dr. Johnson, with whose sturdy 
English character I became acquainted, at a very early 
period of my life, through the good offices of Mr. Boswell. 
In truth, he seems as familiar to my recollection, and 
almost as vivid in his personal aspect to my mind's eye, 
as the kindly figure of my own grandfather. It is only 
a solitary child — left much to such wild modes of cul- 
ture as he chooses for himself while yet ignorant what 
culture means, standing on tiptoe to pull down books 
from no very lofty shelf, and then shutting himself up, as 
it were, between the leaves, going astray through the 
volume at his own pleasure, and comprehending it rather 
by his sensibilities and affections than his intellect — that 
child is the only student that ever gets the sort of inti- 
macy which I am now thinking of, with a literary per- 
sonage. I do not remember, indeed, ever caring much 
about any of the stalwart Doctor's grandiloquent produc- 
tions, except his two stern and masculine poems, " Lon- 
don," and " The Vanity of Human Wishes " ; it was as 
a man, a talker, and a humorist, that I knew and loved 
him, appreciating many of his qualities perhaps more 
thoroughly than I do now, though never seeking to put 
my instinctive perception of his character into language. 
Beyond all question, I might have had a wiser friend 
than he. The atmosphere in which alone he breathed 
was dense ; his awful dread of death showed how much 
muddy imperfection was to be cleansed out of him, 
before he could be capable of spiritual existence ; he 
meddled only with the surface of life, and never cared 
to penetrate farther than to ploughshare depth ; his very 
sense and sagacity were but a one-eyed clear-sighted- 
ness. I laughed at him, sometimes, standing beside his 



144 LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 

knee. And yet, considering that my native propensities 
were towards Fairy Land, and also how much yeast is 
generally mixed up with the mental sustenance of a New 
Englander, it may not have been altogether amiss, in 
those childish and boyish days, to keep pace with this 
heavy-footed traveller and feed on the gross diet that he 
carried in his knapsack. It is wholesome food even now. 
And, then, how English ! Many of the latent sympathies 
that enabled me to enjoy the Old Country so well, and 
that so readily amalgamated themselves with the Amer- 
ican ideas that seemed most adverse to them, may have 
been derived from, or fostered and kept alive by, the 
great English moralist. Never was a descriptive epithet 
more nicely appropriate than that ! Dr. Johnson's mor- 
ality was as English an article as a beefsteak. 

The city of Lichfield (only the cathedral-towns are 
called cities, in England) stands on an ascending site. 
It has not so many old gabled houses as Coventry, for 
example, but still enough to gratify an American appetite 
for the antiquities of domestic architecture. The people, 
too, have an old-fashioned way with them, and stare at 
the passing visitor, as if the railway had not yet quite ac- 
customed them to the novelty of strange faces moving 
along their ancient sidewalks. The old women whom I 
met, in several instances, dropt me a courtesy ; and as they 
were of decent and comfortable exterior, and kept quietly 
on their way without pause or further greeting, it cer- 
tainly was not allowable to interpret their little act of 
respect as a modest method of asking for sixjDence ; so 
that I had the pleasure of considering it a remnant of the 
reverential and hospitable manners of elder times, when 
the rare presence of a stranger might be deemed worth 



LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 145 

a general acknowledgment. Positively, coming from 
such humble sources, I took it all the more as a welcome 
on behalf of the inhabitants, and would not have ex- 
changed it for an invitation from the mayor and magis- 
trates to a public dinner. Yet I wish, merely for the 
experiment's sake, that I could have emboldened myselt 
to hold out the aforesaid sixpence to at least one of the 
old ladies. 

In my wanderings about town, I came to an artificial 
piece of water, called the Minster Pool. It fills the im- 
mense cavity in a ledge of rock, whence the building 
materials of the cathedral were quarried out a great 
many centu^es ago. I should never have guessed the 
little lake to be of man's creation, so very pretty and 
quietly picturesque an object has it grown to be, with its 
green banks, and the old trees hanging over its glassy 
surface, in which you may see reflected some of the bat- 
tlements of the majestic structure that once lay here in 
unshaped stone. Some little children stood on the edge 
of the Pool, angling with pin-hooks ; and the scene re- 
minded me (though really to be quite fair with the 
reader, the gist of the analogy has now escaped me,) 
of that myterious lake in the Arabian Nights, which had 
once been a palace and a city, and where a fisherman 
used to pull out the former inhabitants in the guise of 
enchanted fishes. There is no need of fanciful associa- 
tions to make the spot interesting. It was in the porch 
of one of the houses, in the street that runs beside the 
Minster Pool, that Lord Brooke was slain, in the time 
of the Parliamentary war, by a shot from the battle- 
ments of the cathedral, which was then held by the 

Royalists as a fortress. The incident is commemorated 
10 



146 LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 

by an inscription on a stone, inlaid into the wall of 
the house. 

I know not what rank the Cathedral of Lichfield 
holds among its sister edifices in England, as a piece of 
magnificent architecture. Except that of Chester, (the 
grim and simple nave of which stands yet unrivalled in 
my memory,) and one or two small ones in North Wales, 
hardly worthy of the name of cathedrals, it was the first 
that I had seen. To my uninstructed vision, it seemed 
the object best worth gazing at in the whole world ; and 
now, after beholding a great many more, I remember it 
with less prodigal admiration only because others are 
as magnificent as itself. The traces remaning in my 
memory represent it as airy rather than massive. A 
multitude of beautiful shapes appeared to be compre- 
hended within its single outline ; it was a kind of kalei- 
doscopic mystery, so rich a variety of aspects did it 
assume from each altered point of view, through the 
presentation of a different face, and the rearrangement 
of its peaks and pinnacles and the three battlemented 
towers, with the spires that shot heavenward from all 
three, but one loftier than its fellows. Thus it im- 
pressed you, at every change, as a newly created struc- 
ture of the passing moment, in which yet you lovingly 
recognized the half-vanished structure of the instant 
before, and felt, moreover, a joyful faith in the inde- 
structible existence of all this cloudlike vicissitude. A 
Gothic cathedral is surely the most wonderful work 
which mortal man has yet achieved, so vast, so intricate, 
and so profoundly simple, with such strange, delightful 
recesses in its grand figure, so difficult to comprehend 
within one idea, and yet all so consonant that it ulti- 



LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 147 

mately draws the beholder and his universe into its har- 
mony. It is the only thing in the world that is vast 
enough and rich enough. 

Not that I felt, or was worthy to feel, an unmingled 
enjoyment in gazing at this wonder. I could not elevate 
myself to its spiritual height, any more than I could have 
climbed from the ground to the summit of one of its pin- 
nacles. Ascending but a little way, I continually fell 
back and lay in a kind of despair, conscious that a flood 
of uncomprehended beauty was pouring down upon me, 
of which I could appropriate only the minutest portion. 
After a hundred years, incalculably as my higher sympa- 
thies mighty be invigorated by so divine an employment, 
I should still be a gazer from below and at an awful 
distance, as yet remotely excluded from the interior 
mystery. But it was something gained, even to have 
that painful sense of my own limitations, and that half- 
smothered yearning to soar beyond them. The cathedral 
showed me how earthly I was, but yet whispered deeply 
of immortality. After all, this was probably the best 
lesson that it could bestow, and, taking it as thoroughly 
as possible home to my heart, I was fain to be content. 
If the truth must be told, my ill-trained enthusiasm soon 
flagged, and I began to lose the vision of a spiritual or 
ideal edifice behind the time-worn and weather-stained 
front of the actual structure. Whenever that is the case, 
it is most reverential to look another way ; but the mood 
disposes one to minute investigation, and I took advan- 
tage of it to examine the intricate and multitudinous adorn- 
ment that was lavished on the exterior wall of this great 
church. Everywhere, there were empty niches where 
statues had been thrown down, and here and there a 



148 LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 

statue still lingered in its niche ; and over the chief en- 
trance, and extending across the whole breadth of the 
building, was a row of angels, sainted personages, martyrs, 
and kings, sculptured in reddish stone. Being much cor- 
roded by the moist English atmosphere, during four or 
five hundred winters that they had stood there, these 
benign and majestic figures perversely put me in mind of 
the appearance of a sugar image, after a child has been 
holding it in his mouth. The venerable infant Time has 
evidently found them sweet morsels. 

Inside of the minster there is a long and lofty nave, 
transepts of the same height, and side-aisles and chapels, 
dim nooks of holiness, where in catholic times the lamps 
were continually burning before the richly decorated 
shrines of saints. In the audacity of my ignorance, as 
I humbly acknowledge it to have been, I criticised this 
great interior as too much broken into compartments, and 
shorn of half its rightful impressiveness by the interposi- 
tion of a screen betwixt the nave and chancel. It did not 
spread itself in breadth but ascended to the roof hi lofty 
narrowness. One large body of worshippers might have 
knelt down in the nave, others in each of the transepts, 
and smaller ones in the side-aisles, besides an indefinite 
number of esoteric enthusiasts in the mysterious sanctities 
beyond the screen. Thus it seemed to typify the exclu- 
siveness of sects rather than the world-wide hospitality of 
genuine religion. I had imagined a cathedral with a scope 
more vast. These Gothic aisles, with their groined arches 
overhead, supported by clustered pillars in long vistas up 
and down, were venerable and magnificent, but included 
too much of the twilight of that monkish gloom out of 
which they grew. It is no matter whether I ever came 



LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 149 

to a more satisfactory appreciation of this kind of archi- 
tecture ; the only value of my strictures being to show 
the folly of looking at noble objects in the wrong mood, 
and the absurdity of a new visitant pretending to hold 
any opinion whatever on such subjects, instead of sur- 
rendering himself to the old builder's influence with 
childlike simplicity. 

A great deal of white marble decorates the old stone- 
work of the aisles, in the shape of altars, obelisks, sar- 
cophagi, and busts. Most of these memorials are com- 
memorative of people locally distinguished, especially the 
deans and canons of the cathedral, with their relatives 
and families ; and I found but two monuments of per- 
sonages whom I had ever heard of, — one being Gilbert 
"VYahnesley, and the other Lady Mary Wortley Mon- 
tague, a literary acquaintance of my boyhood. It was 
really pleasant to meet her there ; for after a friend has 
lain in the grave far into the second century, she would 
be unreasonable to require any melancholy emotions in 
a chance interview at her tombstone. It adds a rich 
charm to sacred edifices, this time-honored custom of 
burial in churches, after a few years, at least, when the 
mortal remains have turned to dust beneath the pave- 
ment, and the quaint devices and inscriptions still sjjeak 
to you above. The statues, that stood or reclined in 
several recesses of the Cathedral, had a kind of life, 
and I regarded them with an odd sort of deference, as if 
they were privileged denizens of the precinct. It was 
singular, too, how the memorial of ^Jie latest buried per- 
son, the man whose features were familiar in the streets 
of Lichfield only yesterday, seemed precisely as much at 
home here as Ins mediaeval predecessors. Henceforward 



150 LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 

lie belonged to the cathedral like one of its original pillars. 
Methought this impression in my fancy might be the 
shadow of a spiritual fact. The dying melt into the 
great multitude of the Departed as quietly as a drop of 
water into the ocean, and, it may be, are conscious of no 
unfamiliarity with their new circumstances, but immedi- 
ately become aware of an insufferable strangeness in the 
world which they have quitted. Death has not taken 
them away, but brought them home. 

The vicissitudes and mischances of sublunary affairs, 
however, have not ceased to attend upon these marble 
inhabitants ; for I saw the upper fragment of a sculp- 
tured lady, in a very old-fashioned garb, the lower half 
of whom had doubtless been demolished by Cromwell's 
soldiers when they took the Minster by storm. And 
there lies the remnant of this devout lady on her slab, 
ever since the outrage, as for centuries before, with a 
countenance of divine serenity and her hands clasped in 
prayer, symbolizing a depth of religious faith which no 
earthly turmoil or calamity could disturb. Another 
piece of sculpture (apparently a favorite subject in the 
middle ages, for I have seen several like it in other Ca- 
thedrals), was a reclining skeleton, as faithfully repre- 
senting an open-work of bones as could well be ex- 
pected in a solid block of marble, and at a period, more- 
over, when the mysteries of the human frame were 
rather to be guessed at than revealed. Whatever the 
anatomical defects of his production, the old sculptor had 
succeeded in making it ghastly beyond measure. How 
much mischief has been wrought upon us by this in- 
variable gloom of the Gothic imagination ; flinging itself 
like a death-scented pall over our conceptions of the 



LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 151 

future state, smothering our hopes, hiding our sky, and 
inducing dismal efforts to raise the harvest of immor- 
tality out of what is most opposite to it, — the grave ! 

The Cathedral service is performed twice every day : 
at ten o'clock and at four. When I first entered, the 
choristers (young and old, but mostly, I think, boys, with 
voices inexpressibly sweet and clear, and as fresh as bird- 
notes) were just winding up their harmonious labors, and 
soon came thronging through a side-door from the chan- 
cel into the nave. They were all dressed in long, white 
robes, and looked like a peculiar order of beings, created 
on purpose to hover between the roof and pavement of 
that dim, consecrated edifice, and illuminate it with 
divine melodies, reposing themselves, meanwhile, on the 
heavy grandeur of the organ-tones like cherubs on a 
golden cloud. All at once, however, one of the cherubic 
multitude* pulled off his white gown, thus transforming 
himself before my very eyes into a commonplace youth 
of the day, in modern frock-coat and trousers of a de- 
cidedly provincial cut. This absurd little incident, I 
verily believe, had a sinister effect in putting me at odds 
with the proper influences of the Cathedral, nor could I 
quite recover a suitable frame of mind during my stay 
there. But, emerging into the open air, I began to be 
sensible that I had left a magnificent interior behind me, 
and I have never quite lost the perception and enjoyment 
of it in these intervening years. 

A large space in the immediate neighborhood of the 
Cathedral is called the Close, and comprises beautifully 
kept lawns and a shadowy walk, bordered by the dwell- 
ings of the ecclesiastical dignitaries of the diocese. All 
this row of episcopal, canonical, and clerical residences, 



152 LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 

lias an air of the deepest quiet, repoae, and well-pro- 
tected, though not inaccessible seclusion. They seemed 
capable of including everything that a saint could desire, 
and a great many more things than most of us sinners 
generally succeed in acquiring. Their most marked fea- 
ture is a dignified comfort, looking as if no disturbance 
or vulgar intrusiveness could ever cross their thresholds, 
encroach upon their ornamented lawns, or straggle into 
the beautiful gardens that surround them with flower- 
beds and rich clumps of shrubbery. The episcopal 
palace is a stately mansion of stone, built somewhat in 
the Italian style, and bearing on its front the figures 
1G87, as the date of its erection. A large edifice of 
brick, which, if I remember, stood next to the palace, I 
took to be the residence of the second dignitary of the 
Cathedral ; and, in that case, it must have been the 
youthful home of Addison, whose father was Dean of 
Lichfield. I tried to fancy his figure on the delightful 
walk that extends in front of those priestly abodes, from 
which and the interior lawns it is separated by an open- 
work iron fence, lined with rich old shrubbery, and over- 
arched by a minster-aisle of venerable trees. This path 
is haunted by the shades of famous personages who have 
formerly trodden it. Johnson must have been familiar 
with it, both as a boy, and in his subsequent visits to Lich- 
field, an illustrious old man. Miss Seward, connected 
with so many literary reminiscences, lived in one of the 
adjacent houses. Tradition says that it was a favorite 
spot of Major Andre, who used to pace to and fro under 
these trees, waiting, perhaps, to catch a last angel-glimpse 
of Honoria Sneyd, before he crossed the ocean to en- 
counter his dismal doom from an American court-martial. 



LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 153 

David Garrick, no doubt, scampered along the path in his 
boyish days, and, if he was an early student of the 
drama, must often have thought of those two airy char- 
acters of the " Beaux' Stratagem," Archer and Aimwell, 
who, on this very ground, after attending service at the 
Cathedral, contrive to make acquaintance with the ladies 
of the comedy. These creatures of mere fiction have as 
positive a substance now as the sturdy old figure of John- 
son himself. They live, while realities have died. The 
shadowy walk still glistens with their gold-embroidered 
memories. 

Seeking for Johnson's birthplace, I found it in St. 
Mary's Square, which is not so much a square as the 
mere widening of a street. The house is tall and thin, 
of three stories, with a square front and a roof rising 
steep and high. On a side-view, the building looks as if 
it had been cut in two in the midst, there being no slope 
of the roof on that side. A ladder slanted against the 
wall, and a painter was giving a livelier hue to the 
plaster. In a corner-room of the basement, where old 
Michael Johnson may be supposed to have sold books, 
is now what we should call a dry-goods store, or, accord- 
ing to the English phrase, a mercer's and haberdasher's 
shop. The house has a private entrance on a cross- 
street, the door being accessible by several much worn 
stone-steps, which are bordered by an iron balustrade. I 
set my foot on the steps and laid my hand on the balus- 
trade, where Johnson's hand and foot must many a time 
have been, and ascending to the door, I knocked once, 
and again, and again, and got no admittance. Going 
round to the shop-entrance, I tried to open it, but found 
it as fast bolted as the gate of Paradise. It is mortify- 



154 LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 

ing to be so balked in one's little enthusiasms ; but. look- 
ing round in quest of somebody to make inquiries of, I 
was a good deal eonsoled by the sight of Dr. Johnson 
himself, who happened, just at that moment, to be sitting 
at his ease nearly in the middle of St. Mary's Square, 
with his face turned towards his father's house. 

Of course, it being almost fourscore years since the 
doctor laid aside Ins weary bulk of flesh, together with 
the ponderous melancholy that had so long weighed him 
down, — the intelligent reader will at* once comprehend 
that he was marble in his substance, and seated in a 
marble chair, on an elevated stone-pedestal. In short, it 
was a statue, sculptured by Lucas, and placed here in 
1838, at the expense of Dr. Law, the reverend chancel- 
lor of the Diocese. 

The figure is colossal (though perhaps not much more 
so than the mountainous doctor himself) and looks down 
upon the spectator from its pedestal of ten or twelve feet 
high, with a broad and heavy benignity of aspect, very 
like in feature to Sir Joshua Reynolds's portrait of John- 
son, but calmer and sweeter in expression. Several big 
books are piled up beneath his chair, and, if I mistake 
not, he holds a volume in his hand, thus blinking forth 
at the world out of his learned abstraction, owl-like, yet 
benevolent at heart. The statue is immensely massive, 
a vast ponderosity of stone, not finely spiritualized, nor, 
indeed, fully humanized, but rather resembling a great 
stone-boulder than a man. You must look with the eyes 
of faith and sympathy, or possibly, you might lose the 
human being altogether, and find only a big stone within 
your mental grasp. On the pedestal are three bas-reliefs. 
In the first, Johnson is represented as hardly more than 



LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 155 

a baby, bestriding an old man's shoulders, resting his 
chin on the bald head which he embraces with his little 
arms, and listening earnestly to the high-church eloquence 
of Dr. Sacheverell. In the second tablet, he is seen rid- 
ing to school on the shoulders of two of his comrades, 
while another boy supports him in the rear. 

The third bas-relief possesses, to my mind, a great deal 
of pathos, to which my appreciative faculty is probably 
the more alive, because I have always been profoundly 
impressed by the incident here commemorated, and long 
ago tried to tell it for the behoof of childish readers. It 
shows Johnson in the market-place of Uttoxeter, doing 
penance for an act of disobedience to his father, com- 
mitted fifty years before. He stands bare-headed, a 
venerable figure, and a countenance extremely sad and 
woe-begone, with the wind and rain driving hard against 
him, and thus helping to suggest to the spectator the 
gloom of his inward state. Some market-people and 
children gaze awe-stricken into his face, and an aged 
man and woman, with clasped and uplifted hands, seem 
to be praying for him. These latter personages (whose 
introduction by the artist is none the less effective, be- 
cause, in queer proximity, there are some commodities 
of market-day in the shape of living ducks and dead 
poultry,) I interpreted to represent the spirits of John- 
son's father and mother, lending what aid they could to 
lighten his half-century's burden of remorse. 

I had never heard of the above-described piece of 
sculpture before ; it appears to have no reputation as a 
work of art, nor am I at all positive that it deserves any. 
For me, however, it did as much as sculpture could, un- 
der the circumstances, even if the artist of the Libyan 



156 LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 

Sibyl had wrought it, by reviving my interest in the 
sturdy old Englishman, and particularly by freshening 
my perception of a wonderful beauty and pathetic ten- 
derness in the incident of the penance. So, the next 
day, I left Lichfield for Uttoxeter, on one of the few 
purely sentimental pilgrimages that I ever undertook, to 
see the very spot where Johnson had stood. Boswell, I 
think, speaks of the town (its name is pronounced Yute- 
oxeter) as being about nine miles off from Lichfield, but 
the county-map would indicate a greater distance ; and 
by rail, passing from one line to another, it is as much 
as eighteen miles. I have always had an idea of old 
Michael Johnson sending his literary merchandise by 
carrier's wagon, journeying to Uttoxeter a-foot on mar- 
ket-day morning, selling books through the busy hours, 
and returning to Lichfield at night. This could not pos- 
sibly have been the case. 

Arriving at the Uttoxeter station, the first objects that 
I saw, with a green field or two between them and me, 
were the tower and gray steeple of a church, rising 
among red-tiled roofs and a few scattered trees. A 
very short walk takes you from the station up into the 
town. It had been my previous impression that the 
market-place of Uttoxeter lay immediately roundabout 
the church; and, if I remember the narrative aright, 
Johnson, or Boswell in his behalf, describes his father's 
book-stall as standing in the market-place, close beside 
the sacred edifice. It is impossible for me to say what 
changes may have occurred in the topography of the 
town, during almost a century and a half since Michael 
Johnson retired from business, and ninety years, at least, 
since his son's penance was performed. But the church 



LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 157 

has now merely a street of ordinary width passing around 
it, while the market-place, though near at hand, neither 
forms a part of it nor is really contiguous, nor would its 
throng and bustle be apt to overflow their boundaries and 
surge against the churchyard and the old gray tower. 
Nevertheless, a walk of a minute or two brings a person 
from the centre of the market-place to the church-door ; 
and Michael Johnson might very conveniently have 
located his stall and laid out his literary ware in the 
corner at the tower's base ; better there, indeed, than in 
the busy centre of an agricultural market. But the pic- 
turesque arrangement and full impressiveness of the story 
absolutely require that Johnson shall not have done his 
penance in a corner, ever so little retired, but shall have 
been the very nucleus of the crowd — the midmost man 
of the market-place — a central image of Memory and 
Remorse, contrasting with and overpowering the petty 
materialism around him. He himself, having the force 
to throw vitality and truth into what persons differently 
constituted might reckon a mere external ceremony, 
and an absurd one, could not have failed to see this 
necessity. I am resolved, therefore, that the true site of 
Dr. Johnson's penance was in the middle of the market- 
place. 

That important portion of the town is a rather spacious 
and irregularly shaped vacuity, surrounded by houses 
and shops, some of them old, with red-tiled roofs, others 
wearing a pretence of newness, but probably as old in 
their inner substance as the rest. The people of Uttox- 
eter seemed very idle in the warm summer-day, and 
were scattered in little groups along the side-walks, 
leisurely chatting with one another, and often turning 



158 LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 

about to take a deliberate stare at my humble self; 
insomuch that I felt as if my genuine sympathy for the 
illustrious penitent, and my many reflections about him, 
must have imbued me with some of his own singularity 
of mien. If their great-grandfathers were such redoubt- 
able starers in the Doctor's day, his penance was no light 
one. This curiosity indicates a paucity of visitors to the 
little town, except for market purposes, and I question if 
Uttoxeter ever saw an American before. The only other 
thing that greatly impressed me was the abundance of 
public-houses, one at every step or two: Red Lions, 
White Harts, Bulls' Heads, Mitres, Cross Keys, and 
I know not what besides. These are probably for the 
accommodation of the farmers and peasantry of the 
neighborhood on market-day, and content themselves 
with a very meagre business on other days of the week. 
At any rate, I was the only guest in Uttoxeter at the 
period of my visit, and had but an infinitesimal portion 
of patronage to distribute among such a multitude of 
inns. The reader, however, will possibly be scandalized 
to learn what was the first, and, indeed, the only impor- 
tant affair that I attended to, after coming so far to indulge 
a solemn and high emotion, and standing now on the 
very spot where my pious errand should have been 
consummated. I stepped into one of the rustic hostle- 
ries and got my dinner, — bacon and greens, some mutton- 
chops, juicier and more delectable than all America could 
serve up at the President's table, and a gooseberry pud- 
ding : a sufficient meal for six yeomen, and good enough 
for a prince, besides a pitcher of foaming ale, the whole 
at the pitiful small charge of eighteenpence ! 

Dr. Johnson would have forgiven me, for nobody had 



LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 159 

a heartier faith in beef and mutton than himself. And 
as regards my lack of sentiment in eating my dinner, — 
it was the wisest thing I had done that day. A sensible 
man had better not let himself be betrayed into these 
attempts to realize the things which he has dreamed 
about, and which, when they cease to be purely ideal in 
his mind, will have lost the truest of tlieir truth, the lofti- 
est and profoundest part of their power over his sym- 
pathies. Facts, as we really find them, whatever poetry 
they may involve, are covered with a stony excrescence 
of prose, resembling the crust on a beautiful sea-shell, 
and they never show their most delicate and divinest 
colors until we shall have dissolved away their grosser 
actualities by steeping them long in a powerful men- 
struum of thought. And seeking to actualize them 
again, we do but renew the crust. If this were other- 
wise — if the moral sublimity of a great fact depended 
in any degree on its garb of external circumstances, 
things which change and decay — it could not itself be 
immortal and ubiquitous, and only a brief point of time 
and a little neighborhood would be spiritually nourished 
by its grandeur and beauty. 

Such were a few of the reflections which I mingled 
with my ale, as I remember to have seen an old quaffer 
of that excellent liquor stir up his cup with a sprig of 
some bitter and fragrant herb. Meanwhile I found my- 
self still haunted by a desire to get a definite result out 
of my visit to Uttoxeter. The hospitable inn was called 
the Nag's Head, and standing beside the market-place, 
was as likely as any other to have entertained old 
Michael Johnson in the days when he used to come 
hither to sell books. He, perhaps, had dined on bacon 



160 LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 

and greens, and drunk his ale, and smoked his pipe, in 
the very room where I now sat, which was a low, ancient 
room, certainly much older than Queen Anne's time, 
with a red-brick floor, and a white-washed ceiling, trav- 
ersed by bare, rough beams, the whole in the rudest 
fashion, but extremely neat. Neither did it lack orna- 
ment, the walls b'eing hung with colored engravings of 
prize oxen and other pretty prints, and the mantel-piece 
adorned with earthenware figures of shepherdesses in the 
Arcadian taste of long ago. Michael Johnson's eyes 
might have rested on that self-same earthen image, to ex- 
amine which more closely I had just crossed the brick 
pavement, of the room. And, sitting down again, still as 
I sipped my ale, I glanced through the open window into 
the sunny market-place, and wished that I could hon- 
estly fix on one spot rather than another, as likely to 
have been the holy site where Johnson stood to do his 
penance. 

How strange and stupid it is that tradition should not 
have marked and kept in mind the very place ! How 
shameful (nothing less than that) that there should be no 
local memorial of this incident, as beautiful and touching 
a passage as can be cited out of any human life ! No 
inscription of it, almost as sacred as a verse of Scripture 
on the wall of the church ! No statue of the venerable 
and illustrious penitent in the market-place to throw a 
wholesome awe over its earthliness, its frauds and petty 
wrongs of which the benumbed fingers of conscience can 
make no record, its selfish competition of each man with 
his brother or his neighbor, its traffic of soul-substance 
for a little worldly gain ! Such a statue, if the piety of 
the people did not raise it, might almost have been ex- 



LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 1G1 

pected to grow up out of the pavement of its own accord 
on the spot that had been watered by the rain that 
dripped from Johnson's garments, mingled with his re- 
morseful tears. 

Long after my visit to Uttoxeter, I was told that there 
were individuals in the town who could have shown me 
the exact, indubitable spot where Johnson performed his 
penance. I was assured, moreover, that sufficient inter- 
est was felt in the subject to have induced certain local 
discussions as to the expediency of erecting a memorial. 
With all deference to my polite informant, I surmise that 
there is a mistake, and decline, without further and pre- 
cise evidence, giving credit to either of the above state- 
ments. The inhabitants know nothing, as a matter of 
general interest, about the penance, and care nothing for 
the scene of it. If the clergyman of the parish, for ex- 
ample, had ever heard of it, would he not have used the 
theme, time and again, wherewith to work tenderly and 
profoundly on the souls committed to his charge ? If 
parents were familiar with it, would they not teach it to 
their young ones at the fireside, both to insure reverence 
to their own gray hairs, and to protect the children from 
such unavailing regrets as Johnson bore upon his heart 
for fifty years ? If the site were ascertained, would not 
the pavement thereabouts be worn with reverential foot- 
steps ? Would not every town-born child be able to 
direct the pilgrim thither? While waiting at the sta- 
tion, before my departure, I asked a boy who stood near 
me, — an intelligent and gentlemanly lad, twelve or thir- 
teen years old, whom I should take to be a clergyman's 
son, — I asked him if he had ever heard the story of 
Dr. Johnson, how he stood an hour doing penance near 
11 



162 LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER. 

that church, the spire of which rose before us. The boy- 
stared and answered, — 

« No ! " 

" Were you born in Uttoxeter ? " 

" Yes." 

I inquired if no circumstance such as I had mentioned 
was known or talked about among the inhabitants. 

" No," said the boy ; " not that I ever heard of." 

Just think of the absurd little town, knowing nothing 
of the only memorable incident which ever happened 
within its boundaries since the old Britons built it, this 
sad and lovely story, which consecrates the spot (for I 
found it holy to my contemplation, again, as soon as it lay 
behind me) in the heart of a stranger from three thou- 
sand miles over the sea ! It but confirms what I have 
been saying, that sublime and beautiful facts are best un- 
derstood when etherealized by distance. 



PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 

We set out at a little past eleven, and made our first 
stage to Manchester. We were by this time sufficiently 
Anglicized to reckon the morning a bright and sunny 
one ; although the May sunshine was mingled with water, 
as it were, and distempered with a very bitter east wind. 

Lancashire is £ dreary county, (all, at least, except its 
hilly portions,) and I have never passed through it with- 
out wishing myself anywhere but in that particular spot 
where I then happened to be. A few places along our 
route were historically interesting ; as, for example, Bol- 
ton, which was the scene of many remarkable events in 
the Parliamentary War, and in the market-square of 
which one of the Earls of Derby was beheaded. We 
saw, along the wayside, the never-failing green fields, 
hedges, and other monotonous features of an ordinary* 
English landscape. There were little factory villages, 
too, or larger towns, with their tall chimneys, and their 
pennons of black smoke, their ugliness of brick-work, 
and their heaps of refuse matter from the furnace, which 
seems to be the only kind of stuff which Nature cannot 
take back to herself and resolve into the elements, when 
man has thrown it aside. These hillocks of waste and 
effete mineral always disfigure the neighborhood of iron- 
mongering towns, and, even after a considerable antiquity, 
are hardly made decent with a little grass. 



164 PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 

At a quarter to two we left Manchester by the Shef- 
field and Lincoln Railway. The scenery grew rather 
better than that through which we had hitherto passed, 
though still by no means very striking; for (except in 
the show-districts, such as the Lake country, or Derby- 
shire) English scenery is not particularly well worth 
looking at, considered as a spectacle or a picture. It has 
a real, homely charm of its own, no doubt ; and the rich 
verdure, and the thorough finish added by human art, are 
perhaps as attractive to an American eye as any stronger 
feature could be. Our journey, however, between Man- 
chester and Sheffield was not through a rich tract of 
country, but along a valley walled in by bleak, ridgy hills 
extending straight as a rampart, and across black moor- 
lands with here and there a plantation of trees. Some- 
times there were long and gradual ascents, bleak, windy, 
and desolate, conveying the very impression which the 
reader gets from many passages of Miss Bronte's novels, 
and still more from those of her two sisters. Old stone 
or brick farm-houses, and, once in a while, an old church- 
tower, were visible : but these are almost too common 
* objects to be noticed in an English landscape. 

On a railway, I suspect, what little we do see of the 
country is seen quite amiss, because it was never intended 
to be looked at from any point of view in that straight 
line ; so that it is like looking at the wrong side of a piece 
I of tapestry. The old highways and footpaths were as 
I natural as brooks and rivulets, and adapted themselves 
by an inevitable impulse to the physiognomy of the 
country ; and, furthermore, every object within view of 
them had some subtile reference to their curves and un- 
dulations : but the line of a railway is perfectly artificial, 



PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 165 

and puts all precedent things at sixes-and-sevens. At 
any rate, be the cause what it may, there is seldom any- 
thing worth seeing within the scope of a railway travel- 
ler's eye ; and if there were, it requires an alert marks- 
man to take a flying shot at the picturesque. 

At one of the stations (it was near a village of ancient 
aspect, nestling round a church, on a wide Yorkshire 
moor) I saw a tall old lady in black, who seemed to 
have just alighted from the train. She caught my atten- 
tion by a singular movement of the head, not once only, 
but continually repeated, and at regular intervals, as if 
she were making a stern and solemn protest against some 
action that developed itself before her eyes, and were 
foreboding terrible disaster, if it should be persisted in. 
Of course, it was nothing more than a paralytic or ner- 
vous affection ; yet one might fancy that it had its origin in 
some unspeakable wrong, perpetrated half a lifetime ago 
in this old gentlewoman's presence, either against herself 
or somebody whom she loved still better. Her features 
had a wonderful sternness, which, I presume, was caused 
by her habitual effort to compose and keep them quiet, 
and thereby counteract the tendency to paralytic move- 
ment. The slow, regular, and inexorable character of 
the motion — her look of force and self-control, which 
had the appearance of rendering it voluntary, while yet 
it was so fateful — have stamped this poor lady's face 
and gesture into my memory ; so that, some dark day or 
other, I am afraid she will reproduce herself in«a dis- 
mal romance. 

The train stopped a minute or two, to allow the tickets 
to be taken, just before entering the Sheffield station, 
and thence I had a glimpse of the famous town of razors 



166 PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 

and penknives, enveloped in a cloud of its own diffusing. 
My impressions of it are extremely vague and misty, — 
or, rather, smoky: for Sheffield seems to me smokier 
than Manchester, Liverpool, or Birmingham, — smokier 
than all England besides, unless Newcastle be the ex- 
ception. It might have been Pluto's own metropolis, 
shrouded in sulphurous vapor ; and, indeed, our approach 
to it had been by the Valley of the Shadow of Death, 
through a tunnel three miles in length, quite traversing 
the breadth and depth of a mountainous hill. 

After passing Sheffield, the scenery became softer, 
gentler, yet more picturesque. At one point we saw 
what I believe to be the utmost northern verge of Sher- 
wood Forest, — not consisting, however, of thousand- 
year oaks, extant from Robin Hood's days, but of young 
and thriving plantations, which will require a century or 
two of slow English growth to give them much breadth 
of shade. Earl Fitzwilliam's property lies in this neigh- 
borhood, and probably his castle was hidden among some 
soft depth of foliage not far off. Farther onward the 
country grew quite level around us, whereby I judged 
that we must now be in Lincolnshire ; and shortly after 
six o'clock we caught the first glimpse of the Cathedral 
towers, though they loomed scarcely huge enough for 
our preconceived idea of them. But, as we drew nearer, 
the great edifice began to assert itself, making us ac- 
knowledge it to be larger than our receptivity could 
take fb. 

At the railway-station we found no cab, (it being an 
unknown vehicle in Lincoln,) but only an omnibus be- 
longing to the Saracen's Head, which the driver recom- 
mended as the best hotel in the city, and took us thither 



PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 167 

accordingly. It received us hospitably, and looked com- 
fortable enough ; though, like the hotels of most old Eng- 
lish towns, it had a musty fragrance of antiquity, such as 
I .have smelt in a seldom-opened London church where 
the broad-aisle is paved with tombstones. The house 
was of an ancient fashion, the entrance into its interior 
court-yard being through an arch, in the side of which is 
the door of the hotel. There are long corridors, an in- 
tricate arrangement of passages, and an up-and-down 
meandering of staircases, amid which it would be no 
marvel to encounter some forgotten guest who had gone 
astray a hundred years ago, and was still seeking for his 
bedroom while the rest of his generation were in their 
graves. There is no exaggerating the confusion of mind 
that seizes upon a stranger in the bewildering geography 
of a great old-fashioned English inn. 

This hotel stands in the principal street of Lincoln, 
and within a very short distance of one of the ancient 
city-gates, which is arched across the public way, with a 
smaller arch for foot-passengers on either side ; the 
whole, a gray, time-gnawn, ponderous, shadowy struc- 
ture, through the dark vista of which you look into 
the Middle Ages. The street is narrow, and retains 
many antique peculiarities ; though, unquestionably, Eng- 
lish domestic architecture has lost its most impressive 
features, in the course of the last century. In this re- 
spect, there are finer old towns than Lincoln : Chester, 
for instance, and Shrewsbury, — which last is unusually 
rich in those quaint and stately edifices where the gentry 
of the shire used to make their winter-abodes, in a pro- 
vincial metropolis. Almost everywhere, nowadays, there 
is a monotony of modern brick or stuccoed fronts, hid- 



168 PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 

ing houses that are older than ever, but obliterating the 
picturesque antiquity of the street. 

Between seven and eight o'clock (it being still broad 
daylight in these long English days) we set out to pay a 
preliminary visit to the exterior of the Cathedral. Pass- 
ing through the Stone Bow, as the city-gate close by is 
called, we ascended a street which grew steeper and nar- 
rower as we advanced, till at last it got to be the steepest 
street I ever climbed, — so steep that any carriage, if left 
to itself, would rattle downward much faster than it could 
possibly be drawn up. Being almost the only hill in Lin- 
colnshire, the inhabitants seem disposed to make the most 
of it. The houses on each side had no very remarkable 
aspect, except one with a stone portal and carved orna- 
ments, which is now a dwelling-place for poverty stricken 
people, but may have been an aristocratic abode in the 
days of the Norman kings, to whom its style of architec- 
ture dates back. This is called the Jewess's House, hav- 
ing been inhabited by a woman of that faith who was 
hanged six hundred years ago. 

And still the street grew steeper and steeper. Cer- 
tainly, the Bishop and clergy of Lincoln ought not to be 
fat men, but of very spiritual, saint-like, almost angelic 
habit, if it be a frequent part of their ecclesiastical duty 
to climb this hill ; for it is a real penance, and was prob- 
ably performed as such, and groaned over accordingly, in 
monkish times. Formerly, on the day of his installation, 
the Bishop used to ascend the hill barefoot, and was 
doubtless cheered and invigorated by looking upward to 
the grandeur that was to console him for the humility of 
his approach. We, likewise, were beckoned onward by 
glimpses of the Cathedral towers, and, finally, attaining 



PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 169 

an open square on the summit, we saw an old Gothic 
gateway to the left hand, and another to the right. The 
latter had apparently been a part of the exterior defences 
of the Cathedral, at a time when the edifice was fortified. 
The Avest front rose behind. We passed through one of 
the side-arches of the Gothic portal, and found ourselves 
in the Cathedral Close, a wide, level space, where the 
great old Minster has fair room to sit, looking down on 
the ancient structures that surround it, all of which, in 
former days, were the habitations of its dignitaries and 
officers. Some of them are still occupied as such, though 
others are in too neglected and dilapidated a state to seem 
w r orthy of so splendid an establishment. Unless it be 
Salisbury Close, however, (which is incomparably rich 
as regards the old residences that belong to it,) I remem- 
ber no more comfortably picturesque precincts round any 
other cathedral. But, in truth, almost every cathedral 
close, in turn, has seemed to me the loveliest, cosiest, 
-a list, least wind-shaken, most decorous, and most en- 
joyable shelter that ever the thrift and selfishness of 
mortal man contrived for himself. How delightful, to 
combine all this with the service of the temple ! 

Lincoln Cathedral is built of a yellowish brown-stone, 
which appears either to have been largely restored, or 
else does not assume the hoary, crumbly surface that 
gives such a venerable aspect to most of the ancient 
churches and castles in England. In many parts, the 
recent restorations are quite evident; but other, and 
much the larger portions, can scarcely have been touched 
for centuries : for there are still the gargoyles, perfect, or 
with broken noses, as the case may be, but showing that 
variety and fertility of grotesque extravagance which no 



170 PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON". 

modern imitation can effect. There are innumerable 
niches, too, up the whole height of the towers, above and 
around the entrance, and all over the walls: most of 
them empty, but a few containing the lamentable rem- 
nants of headless saints and angels. It is singular what 
a native animosity lives in the human heart against 
carved images, insomuch that, whether they represent 
Christian saint or Pagan deity, all unsophisticated men 
seize the first safe opportunity to knock off their heads ! 
In spite of all dilapidations, however, the effect of the 
west front of the Cathedral is still exceedingly rich, be- 
ing covered from massive base to airy summit with the 
minutest details of sculpture and carving : at least, it 
was so once ; and even now the spiritual impression of 
its beauty remains so strong, that we have to look twice 
to see that much of it has been obliterated. I have seen 
a cherrystone carved all over by a monk, so minutely 
that it must have cost him half a lifetime of labor ; and 
this cathedral front seems to have been elaborated in 
a monkish spirit, like that cherry-stone. Not that the re- 
sult is in the least petty, but miraculously grand, and all 
the more so for the faithful beauty of the smallest de- 
tails. 

An elderly man, seeing us looking up at the west front, 
came to the door of an adjacent house, and called to in- 
quire if we wished to go into the Cathedral ; but as 
there would have been a dusky twilight beneath its roof, 
like the antiquity that has sheltered itself within, we de- 
clined for the present. So we merely w r alked round the 
exterior, and thought it more beautiful than that of 
York ; though, on recollection, I hardly deem it so majes- 
tic and mighty as that. It is vain to attempt a descrip- 



PILGKIMAGE TO OLD BOSTOX. 171 

tion, or seek even to record the feeling which the edifice 
inspires. It does not impress the beholder as an inani- 
mate object, but as something that has a vast, quiet, 
long-enduring life of its own, — a creation which man 
did not build, though in some way or other it is con- 
nected with him, and kindred to human nature. In short, 
I fall straightway to talking nonsense, when I try to ex- 
press my inner sense of this and other cathedrals. 

While we stood in the close, at the eastern end of the 
Minster, the clock chimed the quarters ; and then Great 
Tom, who hangs in the Rood Tower, told us it was eight 
o'clock, in far the sweetest and mightiest accents that I 
ever heard from any bell, — sIoav, and solemn, and allow- 
ing the profound reverberations of each stroke to die 
away before the next one fell. It was still broad day- 
light in that upper region of the town, and would be so 
for some time longer ; but the evening atmosphere was 
getting sharp and cool. We therefore descended the 
steep street, — our younger companion running before us, 
and gathering such headway that I fully expected him to 
break his head against some projecting wall. 

In the morning we took a fly, (an English term for an 
exceedingly sluggish vehicle,) and drove up to the Min- 
ster by a road rather less steep and abrupt than the one 
we had previously climbed. We alighted before the west 
front, and sent our charioteer in quest of the verger ; but, 
as he was not immediately to be found, a young girl let 
us into the nave. We found it very grand, it is needless 
to say, but not so grand, methought, as the vast nave of 
York Cathedral, especially beneath the great central 
tower of the latter. Unless a writer intends a profess- 
edly architectural description, there is but one set of 



172 PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 

phrases in which to talk of all the cathedrals in England, 
and elsewhere. They are alike in their great features : 
an acre or two of stone flags for a pavement ; rows of 
vast columns supporting a vaulted roof at a dusky height ; 
great windows, sometimes richly bedimmed with ancient 
or modern stained glass ; and an elaborately carved screen 
between the nave and chancel, breaking the vista that 
might else be of such glorious length, and which is fur- 
ther choked up by a massive organ, — in spite of which 
obstructions, you catch the broad, variegated glimmer of 
the painted east window, where a hundred saints wear 
their robes of transfiguration. Behind the screen are the 
carved oaken stalls of the Chapter and Prebendaries, the 
Bishop's throne, the pulpit, the altar, and whatever else 
may furnish out the Holy of Holies. Nor must we for- 
get the range of chapels, (once dedicated to Catholic 
saints, but which have now lost their individual consecra- 
tion,) nor the old monuments of kings, warriors, and prel- 
ates, in the side-aisles of the chancel. In close conti- 
guity to the main body of the Cathedral is the Chapter- 
House, which, here at Lincoln, as at Salisbury, is sup- 
ported by one central pillar rising from the floor, and 
putting forth branches like a tree, to hold up the roof: 
Adjacent to the Chapter-House are the cloisters, extend- 
ing round a quadrangle, and paved with lettered tomb- 
stones, the more antique of which have had their inscrip- 
tions half obliterated by the feet of monks taking their 
noontide exercise in these sheltered walks, five hundred 
years ago. Some of these old burial-stones, although 
with ancient crosses engraved upon them, have been 
made to serve as memorials to dead people of very recent 
date. 



PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 173 

In the chancel, among the tombs of forgotten bishops 
and knights^we saw an immense slab of stone purporting 
to be the monument of Catherine Swineferd, wife of John 
of Gaunt ; also, here was the shrine of the little Saint 
Hugh, that Christian child who was fabled to have been 
crucified by the Jews of Lincoln. The Cathedral is not 
particularly rich in monuments ; for it suffered grievous 
outrage and dilapidation, both at the Reformation and in 
Cromwell's time. This latter iconoclast is in especially 
bad odor with the sextons and vergers of most of the old 
churches which I have visited. His soldiers stabled their 
steeds in the nave of Lincoln Cathedral, and. hacked and 
hewed the monkish sculptures, and the ancestral me- 
morials of great families, quite at their wicked and ple- 
beian pleasure. Nevertheless, there are some most ex- 
quisite and marvellous specimens of flowers, foliage, and 
grape-vines, and miracles of stone-work twined about 
arches, as if the material had been as soft as wax in the 
cunning sculptor's hands, — the leaves being represented 
with all their veins, so that you would almost think it 
petrified Nature, for which he sought to steal the praise 
of Art. Here, too, were those grotesque faces which al- 
ways grin at you from the projections of monkish archi- 
tecture, as if the builders had gone mad with their own 
deep solemnity, or dreaded such a catastrophe, unless per- 
mitted to throw in something ineffably absurd. 

Originally, it is supposed, all the pillars of this great 
edifice, and all these magic sculptures, were polished to 
the utmost degree of lustre ; nor is it unreasonable to 
think that the artists would have taken these further 
pains, when they had already bestowed so much labor in 
working out their conceptions to the extremest point. 



174 PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON". 

But, at present, the whole interior of the Cathedral is 
smeared over with a yellowish wash, the very meanest 
hue imaginable, and for which somebody's soul has a 
bitter reckoning to undergo. 

In the centre of the grassy quadrangle about which the 
cloisters perambulate is a small, mean, brick building, 
with a locked door. Our guide, — I forgot to say that 
we had been captured by a verger, in black, and with a 
white tie, but of a lusty and jolly aspect, — our guide 
unlocked this door, and disclosed a flight of steps. At 
the bottom appeared what I should have taken to be a 
large square of dim, worn, and faded oil-carpeting, which 
might originally have been painted of a rather gaudy 
pattern. This was a Roman tessellated pavement, made 
of small colored bricks, or pieces of burnt clay. It was 
accidentally discovered here, and has not been med- 
dled with, further than by removing the superincumbent 
earth and rubbish. 

Nothing else occurs to me, just now, to be recorded 
about the interior of the Cathedral, except that we saw 
a place where the stone pavement had been worn away 
by the feet of ancient pilgrims scraping upon it, as they 
knelt down before a shrine of the Virgin. 

Leaving the Minster, we now went along a street of 
more venerable appearance than we had heretofore seen, 
bordered with houses, the high, peaked roofs of which 
were covered with red earthen tiles. It led us to a Ro- 
man arch, which was once the gateway of a fortification, 
and has been striding across the English street ever since 
the latter was a faint village-path, and for centuries be- 
fore. The arch is about four hundred yards from the 
Cathedral ; and it is to be noticed that there are Roman 



PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 175 

remains in all this neighborhood, some above ground, 
and doubtless innumerable more beneath it ; for, as in 
ancient Eome itself, an inundation of accumulated soil 
seems to have swept over what was the surface of that 
earlier day. The gateway which I am speaking about is 
probably buried to a third of its height, and perhaps has 
as perfect a Roman pavement (if sought for at the origi- 
nal depth) as that which runs beneath the Arch of Titus. 
It is a rude and massive structure, and seems as stalwart 
now as it could have been two thousand years ago ; and 
though Time has gnawed it externally, he has made what 
amends he could by crowning its rough and broken sum- 
mit with grass and weeds, and planting tufts of^ yellow 
flowers on the projections up and down the sides. 

There are the ruins of a Norman castle, built by the 
Conqueror, in pretty close proximity to the Cathedral ; 
but the old gateway is obstructed by a modem door of 
wood, and we were denied admittance because some part 
of the precincts are used as a prison. We now rambled 
about on the broad back of the hill, which, besides the 
Minster and ruined castle, is the site of some stately and 
queer old houses, and of many mean little hovels. I sus- 
pect that all or most of the life of the present day has 
subsided into the lower town, and that only priests, poor 
people, and . prisoners dwell in these upper regions. In 
the wide, dry moat at the base of the castle-wall are 
clustered whole colonies of small houses, some of brick, 
but the larger portion built of old stones which once 
made part of the Norman keep, or of Roman structures 
that existed before the Conqueror's * castle was ever 
dreamed about. They are like toadstools that spring up 
from the mould of a decaying tree. Ugly as they are, 



176 PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 

they add wonderfully to the picturesqueness of the scene, 
being quite as valuable, in that respect, as the great, 
broad, ponderous ruin of the castle-keep, which rose high 
above our heads, heaving its huge gray mass out of a 
bank of green foliage and ornamental shrubbery, such as 
lilacs and other flowering plants, in which its foundations 
were completely hidden. 

After walking quite round the castle, I made an ex- 
cursion through the Roman gateway, along a pleasant 
and level road bordered with dwellings of various char- 
acter. One or two were houses of gentility, with de- 
lightful and shadowy lawns before them ; many had those 
high, red-tiled roofs, ascending into acutely pointed ga- 
bles, which seem to belong to the same epoch as some of 
the edifices in our own earlier towns ; and there were 
pleasant-looking cottages, very sylvan and rural, with 
hedges so dense and high, fencing them in, as almost to 
hide them up to the eaves of their thatched roofs. In 
front of one of these I saw various images, crosses, and 
relics of antiquity, among which were fragments of old 
Catholic tombstones, disposed by way of ornament. 

We now went home to the Saracen's Head ; and as 
the weather was very unjjropitious, and it sprinkled a 
little now and then, I would gladly have felt myself re- 
leased from further thraldom to the Cathedral. But it 
had taken possession of me, and would not let me be at 
rest ; so at length I found myself compelled to climb the 
hill again, between daylight and dusk. A mist was now 
hovering about the upper height of the great central 
tower, so as to dim and half obliterate its battlements 
and pinnacles, even while I stood in the close beneath it. 
It was the most impressive view that I had had. The 



PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 177 

whole lower part of the structure was seen with perfect 
distinctness ; but at the very summit the mist was so 
dense as to form an actual cloud, as well denned as ever 
I saw resting on a mountain-top. Really and literally, 
Jiere was a " cloud-capt tower." 

The entire Cathedral, too, transfigured itself into a 
richer beauty and more imposing majesty than ever. 
The longer I looked, the better I loved it. Its exterior 
is certainly far more beautiful than that of York Min- 
ster; and its finer effect is due, I tliink, to the many peaks 
in which the structure ascends, and to the pinnacles 
which, as it were, repeat and reecho them into the sky. 
York Cathedral is comparatively square and angular in 
its general effect ; but in this at Lincoln there is a con- 
tinual mystery of variety, so that at every glance you are 
aware of a change, and a disclosure of something new, yet 
working an harmonious development of what you have 
heretofore seen. The west front is unspeakably grand, and 
may be read over and over again forever, and still show 
undetected meanings, like a great, broad page of marvel- 
lous writing in black-letter, — so many sculptured orna- 
ments there are, blossoming out before your eyes, and 
gray statues that have grown there since you looked last, 
and empty niches, and a hundred airy canopies beneath 
which carved images used to be, and where they will 
show themselves again, if you gaze long enough. — But 
I will not say another word about the Cathedral. 

We spent the rest of the day within the sombre pre- 
cincts of the Saracen's Head, reading yesterday's "Times," 
" The Guide-Book of Lincoln," and " The Directory of 
the Eastern Counties." Dismal as the weather was, the 
street beneath our window was enlivened with a great 
12 



178 PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 

bustle and turmoil of people all the evening, because it 
was Saturday night, and they had accomplished their 
week's toil, received their wages, and were making their 
small purchases against Sunday, and enjoying themselves 
as well as they knew how. A band of music passed to 
and fro several times, with the rain-drops falling into the 
mouth of the brazen trumpet and pattering on the bass- 
drum ; a spirit-shop, opposite, the hotel, had a vast run 
of custom; and a coffee-dealer, in the open air, found 
occasional vent for his commodity, in spite of the cold 
water that dripped into the cups. The whole breadth of 
the street, between the Stone Bow and the bridge across 
the Witham, was thronged to overflowing, and humming 
with human life. 

Observing in the Guide Book that a steamer runs on 
the River Witham between Lincoln and Boston, I in- 
quired of the waiter, and learned that she was to start on 
Monday at ten o'clock. Thinking it might be an inter- 
esting trip, and a pleasant variation of our customary 
mode of travel, we determined to make the voyage. The 
Witham flows through Lincoln, crossing the main street 
under an arched bridge of Gothic construction, a little 
below the Saracen's Head. It has more the appearance 
of a canal than of a river, in its passage through the 
town, — being bordered with hewn stone masonwork on 
each side, and provided with one or two locks. The 
steamer proved to be small, dirty, and altogether incon- 
venient. The early morning had been bright ; but the 
sky now lowered upon us with a sulky English temper, 
and we had not long put off before we felt an ugly wind 
from the German Ocean blowing right in our teeth. 
There were a number of passengers on board, country- 



PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 179 

people, such as travel by third class on the railway ; for, 
I suppose, nobody but ourselves ever dreamt of voyaging 
by the steamer for the sake of what he might happen 
upon in the way of river scenery. 

We bothered a good while about getting through a 
preliminary lock ; nor, when fairly under way, did we 
ever accomplish, I think, six miles an hour. Constant 
delays were caused, moreover, by stopping to take up 
passengers and freight, — not at regular landing-places, 
but anywhere along the green banks. The scenery was 
identical with that of the railway, because the latter runs 
along by the riverside through the whole distance, or 
nowhere departs from it except to make a short cut 
across some sinuosity ; so that our only advantage lay in 
the drawling, snail-like slothfulness of our progress, 
which allowed us time enough and to spare for the ob- 
jects along the shore. Unfortunately, there was nothing, 
or next to nothing, to be seen, — the country being one 
unvaried level over the whole thirty miles of our voyage, 
— not a hill in sight, either near or far, except that soli- 
tary one on the summit of which we had left Lincoln 
Cathedral. And the Cathedral was our landmark for 
four hours or more, and at last rather faded out than was 
hidden by any intervening object. 

It would have been a pleasantly lazy day enough, if 
the rough and bitter wind had not blown directly in our 
faces, and chilled us through, in spite of the sunshine 
that soon succeeded a sprinkle or two of rain. These 
English east-winds, which prevail from February till 
June, are greater nuisances than the east-wind of our 
own Atlantic coast, although they do not bring mist and 
storm, as with us, but some of the sunniest weather that 



180 PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 

England sees. Under their influence, the sky smiles and 
is villanous. 

The landscape was tame to the last degree, but had an 
English character that was abundantly worth our look- 
ing at. A green luxuriance of early grass; old, high- 
roofed farm-houses, surrounded by their stone barns and 
ricks of hay and grain ; ancient villages, with the square, 
gray tower of a church seen afar over the level country, 
amid the cluster of red roofs ; here and there a shadowy 
grove of venerable trees, surrounding what was perhaps 
an Elizabethan hall, though it looked more like the abode 
of some rich yeoman. Once, too, we saw the tower of a 
mediaeval castle, that of Tattershall, built by a Crom- 
well, but whether of the Protector's family I cannot tell. 
But the gentry do not appear to have settled multitu- 
dinously in this tract of country ; nor is it to be won- 
dered at, since a lover of the picturesque would as soon 
think of settling in Holland. The river retains its canal- 
like aspect all along" ; and only in the latter part of its 
course does it become more than wide enough for the 
little steamer to turn itself round, — at broadest, not more 
than twice that width. 

The only memorable incident of our voyage happened 
when a mother-duck was leading her little fleet of five 
ducklings across the river, just as our steamer went 
swaggering by, stirring the quiet stream into great waves 
that lashed the banks on either side. I saw the immi- 
nence of the catastrophe, and hurried to the stern of the 
boat to witness its consummation, since I could not pos- 
sibly avert it. The poor ducklings had uttered their 
baby-quacks, and striven with all their tiny might to 
escape : four of them, I believe, were washed aside and 



PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 181 

thrown off unhurt from the steamer's prow ; but the fifth 
must have gone under the whole length of the keel, and 
never could have come up alive. 

At last, in mid-afternoon, we beheld the tall tower of 
Saint Botolph's Church (three hundred feet high, the 
same elevation as the tallest tower of Lincoln Cathedral) 
looming in the distance. At about half-past four we 
reached Boston, (which name has been shortened, in the 
course of ages, by the quick and slovenly English pro- 
nunciation, from Botolph's town,) and were taken by a 
cab to the Peacock, in the market-place. It was the best 
hotel in town, though a poor one enough ; and we were 
shown into a small, stifled parlor, dingy, musty, and 
scented with stale tobacco-smoke, — tobacco-smoke two 
days old, for the waiter assured us that the room had not 
more recently been fumigated. An exceedingly grim 
waiter he was, apparently a genuine descendant of the 
old Puritans of this English Boston, and quite as sour 
as those who people the daughter-city in New England. 
Our parlor had the one recommendation of looking into 
the market-place, and affording a sidelong glimpse of the 
tall spire and noble old church. 

In my first ramble about the town, chance led me to 
the riverside, at that quarter where the port is situated. 
Here were long buildings of an old-fashioned aspect, 
seemingly warehouses, with windows in the high, steep 
roofs. The Custom-House found ample accommodation 
within an ordinary dwelling-house. Two or three large 
schooners were moored along the river's brink, which 
had here a stone margin ; another large and handsome 
schooner was evidently just finished, rigged and equipped 
for her first voyage ; the rudiments of another were on 



182 PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 

the stocks, in a shipyard bordering on the river. Still 
another, while I was looking on, came up the stream, and 
lowered her mainsail, from a. foreign voyage. An old 
man on the bank hailed her and inquired about her 
cargo ; but the Lincolnshire people have such a queer 
way of talking English that I .could not understand the 
reply. Farther down the river, I saw a brig, approach- 
ing rapidly under sail. The whole scene made an odd 
impression of bustle, and sluggishness, and decay, and a 
remnant of wholesome life ; and I could not but contrast 
it with ttoe mighty and populous activity of our own Bos- 
ton, which was once the feeble infant of this old English 
town ; — the latter, perhaps, almost stationary ever since 
that day, as if the birth of such an offspring had taken 
away its own principle of growth. I thought of Long 
Wharf, and Faneuil Hall, and Washington Street, and the 
Great Elm, and the State House, and exulted lustily, — 
but yet began to feel at home in this good old town, for 
its very name's sake, as I never had before felt, in England. 
The next morning we came out in the early sunshine, 
(the sun must have been shining nearly four hours, how- 
ever, for it was after eight o'clock,) and strolled about 
the streets, like people who had a right to be there. 
The market-place of Boston is an irregular square, into 
one end of which the chancel of the church slightly 
projects. The gates of the churchyard were open and 
free to all passengers, and the common footway of the 
towns-people seems to lie to and fro across it. It is 
paved, according to English custom, with flat tomb- 
stones ; and there are also raised or altar tombs, some 
of which have armorial bearings on them. One clergy- 
man has caused himself and his wife to be buried right 



PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 183 

in the middle of the stone-bordered path that traverses 
the churchyard ; so that not an individual of the thou- 
sands who pass along this public way can help trampling 
over him or her. The scene, nevertheless, was very 
cheerful in the morning sun: people going about their 
business in the day's primal freshness, which was just as 
fresh here as in younger villages ; children, with milk- 
pails, loitering over the burial-stones; school-boys play- 
ing leap-frog with the altar-tombs ; the simple old town 
preparing itself for the day, which would be like myriads 
of other days that had passed over it, but yet would be 
worth living through. And down on the churchyard, 
where were buried many generations whom it remem- 
bered in their time, looked the stately tower of Saint 
Botolph ; and it w r as good to see and think of such an 
age-long giant, intermarrying the present epoch with a 
distant past, and getting quite imbued with human nature 
by being so immemorially connected with men's familiar 
knowledge and homely interests. It is a noble tower ; 
and the jackdaws evidently have pleasant homes in their 
hereditary nests among its topmost windows, and live de- 
lightful lives, fitting and cawing about its pinnacles and 
flying buttresses. I should almost like to be a jackdaw 
myself, for the sake of living up there. 

In front of the church, not more than twenty yards off, 
and with a low brick wall between, flows the River 
Witham. On the hither bank a fisherman was washing 
his boat ; and another skiff, with her sail lazily half- 
twisted, lay on the opposite strand. The stream, at this 
point, is about of such width, that, if the tall tower were 
to tumble over flat on its face, its top-stone might per- 
haps reach to the middle of the channel. On the farther 



184 PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 

shore there is a line of alltique-looking houses, with 
roofs of red tile, and windows opening out of them, — 
some of these dwellings being so ancient, that the Rev- 
erend Mr. Cotton, subsequently our first Boston minister, 
must have seen them with his own bodily eyes, when he 
used to issue from the front-portal after service. Indeed, 
there must be very many houses here, and even some 
streets, that bear much the aspect that they did when the 
Puritan divine paced solemnly among them. 

In our rambles about town, we went into a booksel- 
ler's shop to inquire if he had any description of Boston 
for sale. He offered me (or, rather, produced for in- 
spection, not supposing that I would buy it) a quarto his- 
tory of the town, published by subscription, nearly forty 
years ago. The bookseller showed himself a well-in- 
formed and affable man, and a local antiquary, to whom a 
party of inquisitive strangers were a godsend. He had met 
with several Americans, who, at various times, had come 
on pilgrimages to this place, and he had been in corres- 
pondence with others. Happening to have heard the name 
of one member of our party, he showed us great courtesy 
and kindness, and invited us into his inner domicile, 
where, as he modestly intimated, he kept a few articles 
which it might interest us to see. So we went with him 
through the shop, up-stairs, into the private part of his 
establishment ; and, really, it was one of the rarest ad- 
ventures I ever met with, to stumble upon this treasure 
of a man, with his treasury of antiquities and curiosities, 
veiled behind the unostentatious front of a bookseller's 
shop, in a very moderate line of village business. The 
two up-stair rooms into which he introduced us were so 
crowded with inestimable articles, that we were almost 



PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 185 

afraid to stir, for fear of breaking some fragile thing that 
had been accumulating value for unknown centuries. 

The apartment was hung round with pictures and old 
engravings, many of which were extremely rare. Pre- 
mising that he was going to show us "something very 
curious, Mr. Porter went into the next room and re- 
turned with a counterpane of fine linen, elaborately em- 
broidered with silk, which so profusely covered the linen 
that the general effect was as if the main texture were 
silken. It was stained, and seemed very old, and had an 
ancient fragrance. It was wrought all over with birds 
and flowers in a most delicate style of needlework, and 
among other devices, more than once repeated, was the 
cipher, M. S., — being the initials of one of the most un- 
happy names that ever a woman bore. This quilt was 
embroidered by the hands of Mary Queen of Scots, dur- 
ing her imprisonment at Fotheringay Castle ; and having 
evidently been a work of years, she had doubtless shed 
many tears over it, and wrought many doleful thoughts 
and abortive schemes into its texture, along with the 
birds and flowers. As a counterpart to this most pre- 
cious relic, our friend produced some of the handiwork 
of a former Queen of Otaheite, presented by her to Cap- 
tain Cook : it was a bag, cunningly made of some deli- 
cate vegetable stuff, and ornamented with feathers. 
Next, he brought out a green silk waistcoat of very 
antique fashion, trimmed about the edges and pocket- 
holes with a rich and delicate embroidery of gold and 
silver. This (as the possessor of the treasure proved, by 
tracing its pedigree till it came into his hands) was once 
the vestment of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Burleigh : but 
that great statesman must have been a person of very 



186 PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON". 

moderate girth in the chest and waist ; for the garment 
was hardly more than a comfortable fit for a boy of 
eleven, the smallest American of our party, who tried on 
the gorgeous waistcoat. Then, Mr. Porter produced some 
curiously engraved drinking-glasses, with a view of Saint 
Botolph's steeple on one of them, and other Boston edi- 
fices, public or domestic, on the remaining two, very ad- 
mirably done. These crystal goblets had been a present, 
lonsr aero, to an old master of the Free School from his 
pupils ; and it is very rarely, I imagine, that a retired 
schoolmaster can exhibit such trophies of gratitude and 
affection, won from the victims of his birch rod. 

Our kind friend kept bringing out one unexpected and 
wholly unexpectable thing after another, as if he were a 
magician, and had only to fling a private signal into the 
air, and some attendant imp would hand forth any strange 
relic we might choose to ask for. He was especially rich 
in drawings by the Old Masters, producing two or three, 
of exquisite delicacy, by Raphael, one by Salvator, a head 
by Rembrandt, and others, in chalk or pen-and-ink, by 
Giordano, Benvenuto Cellini, and hands almost as fa- 
mous ; and besides what were shown us, there seemed to 
be an endless supply of these art-treasures in reserve. 
On the wall hung a crayon-portrait of Sterne, never en- 
graved, representing him as a rather young man, bloom- 
ing, and not uncomely : it was the worldly face of a man 
fond of pleasure, but without that ugly, keen, sarcastic, 
odd expression that we see in his only engraved portrait. 
The picture is an original, and must needs be very valu- 
able ; and we wish it might be prefixed to some new and 
worthier biography of a writer whose character the world 
has always treated with singular harshness, considering 



PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 187 

how much it owes him. There was likewise a crayon- 
portrait of Sterne's wife, looking so haughty and un- 
amiable, that the wonder is, not that he ultimately left 
her, but how he ever contrived to live a week with such 
an awful woman. 

After looking at these, and a great many more things 
than I can remember, above stairs, we went down to a 
parlor, where this wonderful bookseller opened an old 
cabinet, containing numberless drawers, and looking just 
fit to be the repository of such knick-knacks as were 
stored up in it. He appeared to possess more treasures 
than he himself knew of, or knew where to find ; but, 
rummaging here and there, he brought forth things new 
and old : rose-nobles, Victoria crowns, gold angels, double- 
sovereigns of George IV., two-guinea pieces of George 
II. ; a marriage-medal of the first Napoleon, only forty- 
five of which were ever struck off, and of which even 
the British Museum does not contain a specimen like 
this, in gold ; a brass medal, three or four inches in 
diameter, of a Roman emperor ; together with buckles, 
bracelets, amulets, and I know not what besides. There 
was a green silk tassel from the fringe of Queen Mary's 
bed at Holyrood Palace. There were illuminated mis- 
sals, antique Latin Bibles, and (what may seem of es- 
pecial interest to the historian) a Secret-Book of Queen 
Elizabeth, in manuscript, written, for aught I know, by 
her own hand. On examination, however, it proved to 
contain, not secrets of state, but recipes ( for dishes, 
drinks, medicines, washes, and all such matters of house- 
wifery, the toilet, and domestic quackery, among which 
we were horrified by the title of one of the nostrums, 
" How to kill a Fellow quickly " ! We never doubted 



188 PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 

that bloody Queen Bess might often have had occasion 
for such a recipe, but wondered at her frankness, and at 
her attending to these anomalous necessities in such a 
methodical way. The truth is, we had read amiss, and 
the Queen had spelt amiss : the word was " Fellon," — a 
sort of whitlow, — not " Fellow." 

Our hospitable friend now made us drink a glass of 
wine, as old and genuine as. the curiosities of his cabinet ; 
and while sipping it, we ungratefully tried to excite his 
envy, by telling of various things, interesting to an an- 
tiquary and virtuoso, which we had §een in the course of 
our travels about England. We spoke, for instance, of a 
missal bound in solid gold and set around with jewels, 
but of such intrinsic value as no setting could enhance, 
for it was exquisitely illuminated, throughout, by the 
hand of Raphael himself. We mentioned a little silver 
case which once contained a portion of the heart of Louis 
XIV. nicely done up in spices, but, to the owner's horror 
and astonishment, Dean Buckland popped the kingly 
morsel into his mouth, and swallowed it. We told about 
the black-letter prayer-book of King Charles the Martyr, 
used by him upon the scaffold, taking which into our 
hands, it opened of itself at the Communion Service ; 
and there, on the left-hand page, appeared a spot about 
as large as a sixpence, of a yellowish or brownish hue : 
a drop of the King's blood had fallen there. 

Mr. Porter now accompanied us to the church, but first 
leading us to a vacant spot of ground where old John 
Cotton's vicarage had stood till a very short time since. 
According to our friend's description, it was a humble 
habitation, of the cottage order, built of brick, with a 
thatched roof. The site is now rudely fenced in, and 



PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 189 

cultivated as a vegetable garden. In the right-hand aisle 
of the church there is an ancient chapel, which, at the 
time of our visit, was in process of restoration, and was 
to be dedicated to Mr. Cotton, whom these English peo- 
ple consider as the founder of our American Boston. It 
would contain a painted memorial-window, in honor of 
the old Puritan minister. A festival in commemoration 
of the event was to take place in the ensuing July, to 
which I had myself received an invitation, but I knew 
too well the pains and penalties incurred by an invited 
guest at public festivals in England to accept it. It 
ought to be recorded, (and it seems to have made a very 
kindly impression on our kinsfolk here,) that five hun- 
dred pounds had been contributed by persons in the 
United States, principally in Boston, towards the cost of 
the memorial-window, and the repair and restoration of 
the chapel. 

After we emerged from the chapel, Mr. Porter ap- 
proached us with the vicar, to whom he kindly introduced 
us, and then took his leave. May a stranger's benedic- 
tion rest upon him ! He is a most pleasant man ; rather, 
I imagine, a virtuoso than an antiquary ; for he seemed 
to value the Queen of Otaheite's bag as highly as Queen 
Mary's embroidered quilt, and to have an omnivorous 
appetite for everything strange and rare. Would that 
we could fill up his shelves and drawers (if there are any 
•vacant spaces left) with the choicest trifles that have 
dropped out of Time's carpet-bag, or give him the carpet- 
bag itself, to take out what he will ! 

The vicar looked about thirty years old, a gentleman, 
evidently assured of his position, (as clergymen of the 
Established Church invariably are,) comfortable and 



190 PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 

well-to-do, a scholar and a Christian, and fit to be a 
bishop, knowing how to make the most of life without 
prejudice to the life to come. I was glad to see such a 
model English priest so suitably accommodated with an 
old English church. He kindly and courteously did the 
honors, showing us quite round the interior, giving us 
all the information that we required, and then leaving us 
to the quiet enjoyment of what we came to see. 

The interior of Saint Botolph's is very fine and satis- 
factory, as stately, almost, as a cathedral, and has been 
repaired — so far as repairs were necessary — in a chaste 
and noble style. The great eastern window is of modern 
painted glass, but is the richest, mellowest, and tenderest 
modern window that I have ever seen : the art of paint- 
ing these glowing transparencies in pristine perfection 
being one that the world has lost. T^ie vast, clear space 
of the interior church delighted me. There was no screen, 
— nothing between the vestibule and the altar to break 
the long vista ; even the organ stood aside, — though it 
by and by made us aware of its presence by a melodious 
roar. Around the walls there were old engraved brasses, 
and a stone coffin, and an alabaster knight of Saint John, 
and an alabaster lady, each recumbent at full length, as 
large as life, and in perfect preservation, except for a 
slight modern touch at the tips of their noses. In the 
chancel we saw a great deal of oaken work, quaintly and 
admirably carved, especially about the seats formerly ap- 
propriated to the monks, which were so contrived as to 
tumble down with a tremendous crash, if the occupant 
happened to fall asleep. 

We now essayed to climb into the upper regions. Up 
we went, winding and still winding round the circular 



PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 191 

stairs, till we came to the gallery beneath the stone roof 
of the tower, whence we could look down and see the 
raised Font, and my Talma lying on one of the steps, 
and looking about as big as a pocket-handkerchief. Then 
up again, up, up, up, through a yet smaller staircase, till 
we emerged into another stone gallery, above the jack- 
daws, and far above the roof beneath which we had be- 
fore made a halt. Then up another flight, which led us 
into a pinnacle of the temple, but not the highest ; so, re- 
tracing our steps, we took the right turret this time, and 
emerged into the loftiest lantern, where we saw level 
Lincolnshire, far and near, though with a haze on the 
distant horizon. There were dusty roads, a river, and 
canals, converging towards Boston, which — a congrega- 
tion of red-tiled roofs — lay beneath our feet, with pigmy 
people creeping about, its narrow streets. We were three 
hundred feet aloft, and the pinnacle on which we stood is 
a landmark forty miles at sea. 

Content, and weary of our elevation, we descended the 
corkscrew stairs and left the church ; the last object that 
we noticed in the interior being a bird, which appeared 
to be at home there, and responded with its cheerful 
notes to the swell of the organ. Pausing on the church- 
steps, we observed that there were formerly two statues, 
one on each side of the doorway ; the canopies still re- 
maining, and the pedestals being about a yard from the 
ground. Some of Mr. Cotton's Puritan parishioners are 
probably responsible for the disappearance of these stone 
saints. This doorway at the base of the tower is now 
much dilapidated, but must once have been very rich and 
of a peculiar fashion. It opens its arch through a great 
square tablet of stone, reared against the front of the 



192 PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 

tower. On most of the projections, whether on the 
tower or about the body of the church, there are gar- 
goyles of genuine Gothic grotesqueness, — fiends, beasts, 
angels, and combinations of all three ; and where por- 
tions of the edifice are restored, the modern sculptors 
have tried to imitate these wild fantasies, but with very 
poor success. Extravagance and absurdity have still 
their law, and should pay as rigid obedience to it as the 
primmest things on earth. 

In our further rambles about Boston, we crossed the 
river by a bridge, and observed that the larger part of 
the town seems to lie on that side of its navigable stream. 
The crooked streets and narrow lanes reminded me much 
of Hanover Street, Ann Street, and other portions of the 
North End of our American Boston, as I remember that 
picturesque region in my boyish days. It is not un- 
reasonable to suppose that the local habits and recollec- 
tions of the first settlers may have had some influence on 
the physical character of the streets and houses in the 
New England metropolis ; at any rate, here is a similar 
intricacy of bewildering lanes, and numbers of old peaked 
and projecting-storied dwellings, such as I used to see 
there. It is singular what a home-feeling and sense of 
kindred I derived from this hereditary connection and 
fancied physiognomical resemblance between the old 
town and its well-grown daughter, and how reluctant I 
was, after chill years of banishment, to leave this hos- 
pitable place, on that account. Moreover, it recalled 
some of the features of another American town, my own 
dear native place, when I saw the seafaring people lean- 
ing against posts, and sitting on planks, under the lee of 
warehouses, — or lolling on long-boats, drawn up high 



PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 193 

and dry, as sailors and old wharf-rats are accustomed to 
do, in seaports of little business. In other respects, the 
English town is more village-like than either of the 
American ones. The women and budding girls chat to- 
gether at their doors, and exchange merry greetings with 
young men ; children chase one another in the summer 
twilight; school-boys sail little boats on the river, or 
play at marbles across the flat tombstones in the church- 
yard ; and ancient men, in breeches and long waistcoats, 
wander slowly about the streets, with a certain familiarity 
of deportment, as if each one were everybody's grand- 
father. I have frequently observed, in old English 
towns, that Old Age comes forth more cheerfully and 
genially into the sunshine than among ourselves, where 
the rush, stir, bustle, and irreverent energy of youth are 
so preponderant, that the poor, forlorn grandsires begin 
to doubt whether they have a right to breathe in such a 
world any longer, and so hide their silvery heads in soli- 
tude. Speaking of old men, I am reminded of the 
scholars of the Boston Charity-School, who walk about 
in antique, long-skirted blue coats, and knee-breeches, 
and with bands at .their necks, — perfect and grotesque 
pictures of the costume of three centuries ago. 

On the morning of our departure, I looked from the 
parlor-window of the Peacock into the market-place, 
and beheld its irregular square already well covered with 
' booths, and more in process of being put up, by stretch- 
ing tattered sail-cloth on poles. It was market-day. 
The dealers were arranging their commodities, consist- 
ing chiefly of vegetables, the great bulk of which seemed 
to be cabbages. Later in the forenoon there was a much 
greater variety of merchandise : basket-work, both for 
13 



194 PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON. 

fancy and use ; twig-brooms, beehives, oranges, rustic 
attire ; all sorts of things, in shtfrt, that are commonly 
sold at a rural fair. I heard the lowing of cattle, too, 
and the bleating of sheep, and found that there was a 
market for cows, oxen, and pigs, in another part of the 
town. A crowd of towns-people and Lincolnshire yeo- 
men elbowed one another in the square ; Mr. Punch was 
squeaking in one corner, and a vagabond juggler tried to 
find space for his exhibition in another : so that my final 
glimpse of Boston was calculated to leave a livelier im- 
pression than my former ones. Meanwhile the tower of 
Saint Botolph's looked benignantly down ; and I fancied 
it was bidding me farewell, as it did Mr. Cotton, two or 
three hundred years ago, and telling me to describe its 
venerable height, and the town beneath it, to the people 
of the American city, who are partly akin, if not to the 
living inhabitants of Old Boston, yet to some of the dust 
that lies in its churchyard. 

One thing more. They have a Bunker Hill in the 
vicinity of their town ; and (what could hardly be ex- 
pected of an English community) seem proud to think 
that their neighborhood has given name to our first and 
most widely celebrated and best remembered battle- 
field. 



NEAR OXFORD. 

On a fine morning in September, we set out on an 
excursion to Blenheim, — the sculptor and myself being 
seated on the box of our four-horse carriage, two more 
of the party in the dicky, and the others less agreeably 
accommodated inside. We had no coachman, but two 
postilions in short scarlet jackets and leather breeches 
with top-boots, each astride of a horse ; so that, all the 
way along, when not otherwise attracted, we had the 
interesting spectacle of their up-and-down bobbing in 
the saddle. It was a sunny and beautiful day, a speci- 
men of the perfect English weather, just warm enough 
for comfort, — indeed, a little too warm, perhaps, in the 
noontide sun, — yet retaining a mere spiee or suspicion 
of austerity, which made it all the more enjoyable. 

The country between Oxford and Blenheim is not par- 
ticularly interesting, being almost level, or undulating very 
slightly; nor is Oxfordshire, agriculturally, a rich part 
of England. We saw one or two hamlets, and I espe- 
cially remember a picturesque old gabled house at a 
turnpike-gate, and, altogether, the wayside scenery had 
an aspect of old-fashioned English life ; but there was 
nothing very memorable till we reached Woodstock, and 
stopped to water our horses at the Black Bear. This 
neighborhood is called New Woodstock, but has by 
no means the brand-new appearance of an American 



196 NEAR OXFORD. 

town, being a large village of stone houses, most of them 
pretty well time-worn and weather-stained. The Black 
Bear is an ancient inn, large and respectable, with balus- 
traded staircases, and intricate passages and corridors, 
and queer old pictures and engravings hanging in the 
entries and apartments. We ordered a lunch (the most 
delightful of English institutions, next to dinner) to be 
ready against our return, and then resumed our drive to 
Blenheim. 

The park-gate of Blenheim stands close to the end of 
the village-street of Woodstock. Immediately on pass- 
ing through its portals, we saw the stately palace in the 
distance, but made a wide circuit of the park before ap- 
proaching it. This noble park contains three thousand 
acres of land, and is fourteen miles in circumference. 
Having been, in part, a royal domain before it was 
granted to the Marlborough family, it contains many 
trees of unsurpassed antiquity, and has doubtless been 
the haunt of game and deer for centuries. We saw 
pheasants in abundance, feeding in the open lawns and 
glades ; and the stags tossed their antlers and bounded 
away, not affrighted, but only shy and gamesome, as we 
drove by. It is a magnificent pleasure-ground, not too 
tamely kept, nor rigidly subjected within rule, but vast 
enough to have lapsed back into Nature again, after all 
the pains that the landscape-gardeners of Queen Anne's 
time bestowed on it, when the domain of Blenheim was 
scientifically laid out. The great, knotted, slanting 
trunks of the old oaks do not now look as if man had 
much intermeddled with their growth and postures. The 
trees of later date, that were set out in the Great Duke's 
time, are arranged on the plan of the order of battle in 



NEAR OXFORD. 197 

which the illustrious commander ranked his troops at 
Blenheim ; but the ground covered is so extensive, and 
the trees now so luxuriant, that the spectator is not dis- 
agreeably conscious of their standing in military array, 
as if Orpheus had summoned them together by beat of 
drum. The effect must have been very formal a hundred 
and fifty years ago, but has ceased to be so, — although 
(he trees, I presume, have kept their ranks with even 
more fidelity than Marlborough's veterans did. 

One of the park-keepers, on horseback, rode beside 
our carriage, pointing out the choice views, and glimpses 
at the palace, as we drove through the domain. There is 
a very large artificial lake, (to say the truth, it seemed 
to me fully worthy of being compared with the Welsh 
lakes, at least, if not with those of Westmoreland,) which 
was created by Capability Brown, and fills the basin that 
he scooped for it, just as if Nature had poured these 
broad waters into one of her own valleys. It is a most 
beautiful object at a distance, and not less so on its imme- 
diate banks ; for the water is very pure, being supplied 
by a small river, of the choicest transparency, which was 
turned thitherward for the purpose. And Blenheim owes 
not merely this water-scenery, but almost all its other 
beauties, to the contrivance of man. Its natural features 
are not striking ; but Art has effected such wonderful 
things that the uninstructed visitor would never guess that 
nearly the whole scene was but the embodied thought of 
a human mind. A skilful painter hardly does more for his 
blank sheet of canvas than the landscape-gardener, the 
planter, the arranger of trees, has done for the monoto- 
nous surface of Blenheim, — making the most of every 
undulation, — flinging down a hillock, a big lump of earth 



198 NEAR OXFORD. 

out of a giant's hand, wherever it was needed, — putting 
in beauty as often as there was a niche for it, — opening 
vistas to every point that deserved to be .seen, and throw- 
ing a veil of impenetrable foliage around what ought to 
be hidden ; — and then, to be sure, the lapse of a cen-r 
tury has softened the harsh outline of man's labors, and 
has given the place back to Nature again with the addi- 
tion of what consummate science could achieve. 

After driving a good way, we came to a battlemented 
tower and adjoining house, which used to be the residence 
of the Ranger of Woodstock Park, who held charge of 
the property for the King before the Duke of Marl- 
borough possessed it. The keeper opened the door for 
us, and in the entrance-hall we found various things that 
had to do with the chase and woodland sports. We 
mounted the staircase, through several stories, up to the 
top of the tower, whence there was a view of the spires 
of Oxford, and of points much farther off, — very indis- 
tinctly seen, however, as is usually the case with the 
misty distances of England. Returning to the ground- 
floor, we were ushered into the room in which died Wil- 
mot, the wicked Earl of Rochester, who was Ranger of 
the Park in Charles II.'s time. It is a low and bare little 
room, with a window in front, and a smaller one behind ; 
and in the contiguous entrance-room there are the re- 
mains of an old bedstead, beneath the canopy of which, 
perhaps, Rochester may have made the penitent end that 
Bishop Burnet attributes to him. I hardly know what 
it is, in this poor fellow's character, which affects us with 
greater tenderness on his behalf than for all the other 
profligates of his day, who seem to have been neither 
better nor worse than himself. I rather suspect that he 



NEAR OXFORD. 199 

had a human heart which never quite died out of him, 
and the warmth of which is still faintly perceptible amid 
the dissolute trash which he left behind. 

Methinks, if such good fortune ever befell a bookish 
man, I should choose this lodge for my own residence, with 
the topmost room of the tower for a study, and all the se- 
clusion of cultivated wildness beneath to ramble in. There 
being no such possibility, we drove on, catching glimpses 
of the palace in new points of view, and by and by came 
to Rosamond's Well. The particular tradition that con- 
nects Fair Rosamond with it is not now in my memory ; 
but if Rosamond ever lived and loved, and ever had her 
abode in the maze of Woodstock, it may well be believed 
that she and Henry sometimes sat beside this spring. It 
gushes out from a bank, through some old stone-work, 
and dashes its little cascade (about as abundant as one 
might turn out of a large pitcher) into a pool, whence it 
steals away towards the lake, which is not far removed. 
The water is exceedingly cold, and as pure as the legen- 
dary Rosamond was not, and is fancied to possess medicinal 
virtues, like springs at which saints have quenched their 
thirst. There were two or three old women and some 
children in attendance with tumblers, which they present 
to visitors, full of the consecrated water ; but most of us 
filled the tumblers for ourselves, and drank. 

Thence we drove to the Triumphal Pillar which was 
erected in honor of the Great Duke, and on theieummit 
of which he stands, in a Roman garb, holding a winged 
figure of Victory in his hand, as an ordinary man might 
hold a bird. The column is I know not how many feet 
high, but lofty enough, at any rate, to elevate Marlbor- 
ough far above the rest of the world, and to be visible a 



200 NEAR OXFORD. 

long way off ; and it is so placed in reference to other ob- 
jects, that, wherever the hero wandered about his grounds, 
and especially as he issued frwh his mansion, he must in- 
evitably have been reminded of his glory. In truth, until 
I came to Blenheim, I never had so positive and material 
an idea of what Fame really is — of what the admiration 
of his country can do for a successful warrior — as I carry 
away with me and shall always retain. Unless he had 
the moral force of a thousand men together, his egotism 
(beholding himself everywhere, imbuing the entire soil, 
growing in the woods, rippling and gleaming in the water, 
and pervading the very air with his greatness) must have 
been swollen within him like the liver of a Strasbourg 
goose. On the huge tablets inlaid into the pedestal of 
the column, the entire Act of Parliament, bestowing 
Blenheim on the Duke of Marlborough and his posterity, 
is engraved in deep letters, painted black on the marble 
ground. The pillar stands exactly a mile from the prin- 
cipal front of the palace, in a straight line with the pre- 
cise centre of its entrance-hall ; so that, as already said, 
it was the Duke's principal object of contemplation. 

We now proceeded to the palace-gate, which is a great 
pillared archway, of wonderful loftiness and state, giving 
admittance into a spacious quadrangle. A stout, elderly, 
and rather surly footman in livery appeared at the en- 
trance, and took possession of whatever canes, umbrellas, 
and pamsols he could get hold of, in order to claim six- 
pence on our departure. This had a somewhat ludicrous 
effect. There is much public outcry against the mean- 
ness of the present Duke in his arrangements for the 
admission of visitors (chiefly, of course, his native country- 
men) to view the magnificent palace which their fore- 



NEAR OXFORD. 201 

fathers bestowed upon his own. In many cases, it seems 
hard that a private abode should be exposed to the -in- 
trusion of the public merely because the proprietor has 
inherited or created a splendor which attracts general 
curiosity ; insomuch that his home loses its sanctity and 
seclusion for the very reason that it is better than other 
men's houses. But in the case of Blenheim, the public 
have certainly an equitable claim to admission, both be- 
cause the fame of its first inhabitant is a national pos- 
session, and because the mansion was a national gift, one 
of the purposes of which was to be a token of gratitude 
and glory to the English people themselves. If a man 
chooses to be illustrious, he is very likely to incur some 
little inconveniences himself, and entail them on his pos- 
terity. Nevertheless, his present Grace of Marlborough 
absolutely ignores the public claim above suggested, and 
(with a thrift of which even the hero of Blenheim him- 
self did not set the example) sells tickets admitting six 
persons at ten shillings: if only one person enters the 
gate, he must pay for six ; and if there are seven in com- 
pany, two tickets are required to admit them. The at-* 
tendants, who meet you everywhere in the park and 
palace, expect fees on their own private account, — their 
noble master pocketing the ten shillings. But, to be sure, 
the visitor gets his money's worth, since it buys him the 
right to speak just as freely of the Duke of Marlborough 
as if he were the keeper of the Cremorne Gardens.* 

* The above was written two or three years ago, or more; and the 
Duke of that day has since transmitted his coronet to his successor, 
who, we understand, has adopted much more liberal arrangements. 
There is seldom anything to criticize or complain of, as regards the 
facility of obtaining admission to interesting private houses in Eng- 
land. 



202 NEAR OXFORD. 

Passing through a gateway on the opposite side of the 
quadrangle, we had before us the noble classic front of 
the palace, with its two projecting wings. We ascended 
the lofty steps of the portal, and were admitted into the 
entrance-hall, the height of which, from floor to ceiling, is 
not much less than seventy feet, being the entire elevation 
of the edifice. The hall is lighted by windows in the upper 
story, and, it being a clear, bright day, was very radiant 
with lofty sunshine, amid which a swallow was flitting to 
and fro. The ceiling was jDainted by Sir James Thornhill 
in some allegorical design, (doubtless commemorative of 
Marlborough's victories,) the purport of which I did not 
take the trouble to make out, — contenting myself with 
the general effect, which was most splendidly and effec- 
tively ornamental. 

We were guided through the show-rooms by a very 
civil person, who allowed us to take pretty much our own 
time in looking at the pictures. The collection is exceed- 
ingly valuable, — many of these works of Art having 
been presented to the Great Duke by the crowned heads 
• of England or the Continent. One room was all aglow 
with pictures by Kubens ; and there were works of Ra- 
phael, and many other famous painters, any one of which 
would be sufficient to illustrate the meanest house that 
might contain it. I remember none of them, however, 
(not being in a picture-seeing mood,) so well as Van- 
dyck's large and familiar picture of Charles I. on horse- 
back, with a figure and face of melancholy dignity such 
as never by any other hand was put on canvas. Yet, on 
considering this face of Charles (which I find often re- 
peated in half-lengths) and translating it from the ideal 
into literalism, I doubt whether the unfortunate king was 



NEAR OXFORD. 203 

really a handsome or impressive-looking man : a high, 
thin-ridged nose, a meagre, hatchet face, and reddish hair 
and beard, — these are the literal facts. It is the paint- 
er's art that has thrown such pensive and shadowy grace 
around him. 

On our passage through this beautiful suite of apart- 
ments, we saw, through the vista of open doorways, a boy 
of ten or twelve years old coming towards us from the 
farther rooms. He had on a straw hat, a linen sack that 
had certainly been washed and re-washed for a summer 
or two, and gray trousers a good deal worn, — a dress, 
in short, which an American mother in middle station 
would have thought too shabby for her darling school- 
boy's ordinary wear. This urchin's face was rather 
pale, (as those of English children are apt to be, quite as 
often as , our own,) but he had pleasant eyes, an intelli- 
gent look, and an agreeable, boyish manner. It was Lord 
Sunderland, grandson of the present Duke, and heir — 
though not, I think, in the direct line — of the blood of 
the great Marlborough, and of the title and estate. 

After passing through the first suite of rooms, we were 
conducted through a corresponding suite on the opposite 
side of the entrance-hall. These latter apartments are 
most richly adorned with tapestries, wrought and pre- 
sented to the first Duke by a sisterhood of Flemish nuns ; 
they look like great, glowing pictures, and completely 
cover the walls of the rooms. The designs purport to 
represent the Duke's battles and sieges ; and everywhere 
we see the hero himself, as large as life, and as gorgeous 
in scarlet and gold as the holy sisters could make him, 
with a three-cornered hat and flowing wig, reining in his 
horse, and extending his leading-staff in the attitude of 



204 NEAR OXFORD. 

command. Next to Marlborough, Prince Eugene is the 
most prominent figure. In the way of upholstery, there 
can never have been anything more magnificent than 
these tapestries ; and, considered as works of Art, they 
have quite as much merit as nine pictures out of ten. 

One whole wing of the palace is occupied by the 
library, a most noble room, with a vast perspective length 
from end to end. Its atmosphere is brighter and more 
cheerful than that of most libraries : a wonderful contrast 
to the old college-libraries of Oxford, and perhaps less 
sombre and suggestive of thoughtfiilness than any large 
library ought to be ; inasmuch as so many studious brains 
as have left their deposit on the shelves Cannot have con- 
spired without producing a very serious and ponderous 
result. Both walls and ceiling are white, and there are 
elaborate doorways and fireplaces of white marble. The 
floor is of oak, so highly polished that our feet slipped 
upon it as if it had been New-England ice. At one end 
of the room stands a statue of Queen Anne in her royal 
robes, which are so admirably designed and exquisitely 
wrought that the spectator certainly gets a strong concep- 
tion of her royal dignity ; while the face of the statue, 
fleshy and feeble, doubtless conveys a suitable idea of her 
personal character. The marble of this work, long as it 
has stood there, is as white as snow just fallen, and must 
have required most faithful and religious care to keep it 
so. As for the volumes of the library, they are wired 
within the cases and turn their gilded backs upon the 
visitor, keeping their treasures of wit and wisdom just as 
intangible as if still in the unwrought mines of human 
thought. 

I remember nothing else in the palace, except the 



NEAR OXFORD. 205 

chapel, to which we were conducted last, and where we 
saw a splendid monument to the first Duke and Duchess, 
sculptured by Rysbrach, at the cost, it is said, of forty 
thousand pounds. The design includes the statues of the 
deceased dignitaries, and various allegorical flourishes, 
fantasies, and confusions; and beneath sleep the great 
Duke and his proud wife, their veritable bones and dust, 
and probably all the Marlboroughs that have since died. 
It is not quite a comfortable idea, that these mouldy an- 
cestors still inhabit, after their fasfafe, the house where 
their successors spend the passing day ; but the adulation 
lavished upon the hero of Blenheim could not have been 
consummated, unless the palace of his lifetime had be- 
come likewise a stately mausoleum over his remains, — 
and such we felt it all to be, after gazing at his tomb. 

The next business was to see the private gardens. An 
old Scotch under-gardener admitted us and led the way, 
and seemed to have a fair prospect of earning the fee all 
by himself; but by and by another respectable Scotch- 
man made his appearance and took us in charge, proving 
to be the head-gardener in person. He was extremely 
intelligent and agreeable, talking both scientifically and 
lovingly about trees and plants, of which there is every 
variety capable of English cultivation. Positively, the 
Garden of Eden cannot have been more beautiful than this 
private garden of Blenheim. It contains three hundred 
acres, and by the artful circumlocution of the paths, and the 
undulations, and the skilfully interposed clumps of trees, 
is made to appear limitless. The sylvan delights of a 
whole country are compressed into this space, as whole 
fields of Persian roses go to the concoction of an ounce 
of precious attar. The world within that garden-fence 



206 NEAR OXFORD. 

is not the same weary and dusty world with which we 
outside mortals are conversant ; it is a finer, lovelier, 
more harmonious Nature ; and the Great Mother lends 
herself kindly to the gardener's will, knowing that he 
will make evident the half-obliterated traits of her pris- 
tine and ideal beauty, and allow her to take all the credit 
and praise to herself. I doubt whether there is ever any 
winter within that precinct, — any clouds, except the 
fleecy ones of summer. The sunshine that I saw there 
rests upon my re^pction of it as if it were eternal. 
The lawns and glades are like the memory of places 
where one has wandered when first in love. 

What a good and happy life might be spent in a para- 
dise like this ! And yet, at that very moment, the be- 
sotted Duke (ah ! I have let out a secret which I meant 
to keep to myself ; but the ten shillings must pay for all) 
was in that very garden, (for the guide told us so, and 
cautioned our young people not to be uproarious,) and, 
if in a condition for arithmetic, was thinking of nothing 
nobler than how many ten-shilling tickets had that day 
been sold. Republican as I am, I should still love to think 
that noblemen lead noble lives, and that all this stately 
and beautiful environment may serve to elevate them a 
little way above the rest of us. If it fail to do so, the 
disgrace falls equally upon the whole race of mortals as 
on themselves ; because it proves that no more favorable 
conditions of existence would eradicate our vices and 
weaknesses. How sad, if this be so ! Even a herd of 
swine, eating the acorns under those magnificent oaks of 
Blenheim, would be cleanlier and of better habits than 
ordinary swine. 

Well, all that I have written is pitifully meagre, as a 



NEAR OXFORD. 207 

description of Blenheim ; and I hate to leave it without 
some more adequate expression of the noble edifice, with 
its rich domain, all as I saw them in that beautiful sun- 
shine ; for, if a day had been chosen out of a hundred 
years, it could not have been a finer one. But I must 
give up the attempt ; only further remarking that the 
finest trees here were cedars, of which I saw one — and 
there may have been many such — immense in girth, and 
not less than three centuries old. I likewise saw a vast 
heap of laurel, two hundred feet in circumference, all 
growing from one root ; and the gardener offered to show 
us another growth of twice that stupendous size. If the 
Great Duke himself had been buried in that spot, his 
heroic heart could not have been the seed of a more 
plentiful crop of laurels. 

We now went back to the. Black Bear, and sat down 
to a^)ld collation, of which we ate abundantly, and drank 
(in the good old English fashion) a due proportion of 
various delightful liquors. A stranger hi England, in 
his rambles to various quarters of the country, may learn 
little in regard to wines, (for the ordinary English taste 
is simple, though sound, in that particular,) but he makes 
acquaintance with more varieties of hop and malt liquor 
than he previously supposed to exist. I remember a sort 
of foaming stuff, called hop-champagne, which is very 
vivacious, and appears to be a hybrid between ale and 
bottled cider. Another excellent tipple for warm weather 
is concocted by mixing brown-stout or bitter ale with 
ginger-beer, the foam of which stirs up the heavier liquor 
from its depths, forming a compound of singular vivacity 
and sufficient body. But of all things ever brewed from 
malt, (unless it be the Trinity Ale of Cambridge, which 



208 NEAR OXFORD. 

I drank long afterwards, and which Barry Cornwall has 
celebrated in immortal verse,) commend me to the Arch- 
deacon, as the Oxford scholars call it, in honor of the 
jovial dignitary who first taught these erudite worthies 
how to brew their favorite nectar. John Barleycorn has 
given his very heart to this admirable liquor ; it is a 
superior kind of ale, the Prince of Ales, with a richer 
flavor and a mightier spirit than you can find elsewhere 
in this weary world. Much have we been strengthened 
and encouraged by the potent blood of the Archdeacon ! 

A few days after our excursion to Blenheim, the same 
party set forth, in two flies, on a tour to some other places 
of interest in the neighborhood of Oxford. It was again 
a delightful day ; and, in truth, every day, of late, had 
been so pleasant that it seemed as if each must be the 
very last of such perfect weather ; and yet the long suc- 
cession had given us confidence in as many more to^pme. 
The climate of England has been shamefully maligned ; 
its sulkiness and asperities are not nearly so offensive as 
Englishmen tell us (their climate being the only attribute 
of their country which they never overvalue) ; and the 
really good summer weather is the very kindest and 
sweetest that the world knows. 

We first drove to the village of Cumnor, about six 
miles from Oxford, and alighted at the entrance of the 
church. Here, while waiting for the keys, we looked at 
an old wall of the churchyard, piled up of loose gray 
stones which are said to have once formed a portion of 
Cumnor Hall, celebrated in Mickle's ballad and Scott's 
romance. The hall must have been in very close vicinity 
to the church, — not more than twenty yards off ; and I 
waded through the loug, dewy grass of the churchyard, 



NEAR OXFORD. 209 

and tried to peep over the wall, in hopes to discover some 
tangible and traceable remains of the edifice. But the 
wall was just too high to be overlooked, and difficult to 
clamber over without tumbling down some of the stones ; 
so I took the word of one of our party, who had been 
here before, that there is nothing interesting on the other 
side. The churchyard is in rather a neglected state, and 
seems not to have been mown for the benefit of the par- 
son's cow ; it contains a good many gravestones, of which 
I remember only some upright memorials of slate to in- 
dividuals of the name of Tabbs. 

Soon a woman arrived with the key of the church- 
door, and we entered the simple old edifice, which has 
the pavement of lettered tombstones, the sturdy pillars 
and low arches, and other ordinary characteristics of an 
English country church. One or two pews, probably 
those of the gentlefolk of the neighborhood, were better 
furnished than the rest, but all in a modest style. Near 
the high altar, in the holiest place, there is an oblong, 
angular, ponderous tomb of blue marble, built against the 
wall, and surmounted by a carved canopy of the same 
material ; and over the tomb, and beneath the canopy, 
are two monumental brasses, such as we oftener see in- 
laid into a church pavement. On these brasses are en- 
graved the figures of a gentleman in armor and a lady in 
an antique garb, each about a foot high, devoutly kneeling 
in prayer ; and there is a long Latin inscription likewise 
cut into the enduring brass, bestowing the highest eulo- 
gies on the character of Anthony Forster, who, with his 
virtuous dame, lies buried beneath this tombstone. His 
is the knightly figure that kneels above ; and if Sir Wal- 
ter Scott ever saw this tomb, he must have had an even 
14 



210 NEAR OXFORD. 

greater than common disbelief in laudatory epitaphs, to 
venture on depicting Anthony Forster in such hues as 
blacken him in the romance. For my part, I read the 
inscription in full faith, and believe the poor deceased 
gentleman to be a much-wronged individual, with' good 
grounds for bringing an action of slander in the courts 
above. 

But the circumstance, lightly as we treat it, has its 
serious moral. What nonsense it is, this anxiety, which 
so worries us, about our good fame, or our bad fame, after 
death! If it were of the slightest real moment, our 
reputations would have been placed by Providence more 
in our own power, and less in other people's, than we now 
find them to be. If poor Anthony Forster happens to 
have met Sir Walter in the other world, I doubt whether 
he has ever thought it worth while to complain of the 
latter's misrepresentations. 

We did not remain long in the church, as it contains 
nothing else of interest ; and driving through the village, 
we passed a pretty large and rather antique-looking inn, 
bearing the sign of the Bear and Ragged Staff. It could 
not be so old, however, by at least a hundred years, as 
Giles Gosling's time ; nor is there any other object to 
remind the visitor of the Elizabethan age, unless it be 
a few ancient cottages, that are perhaps of still earlier 
date. Cumnor is not nearly so large a village, nor a 
place of such mark, as one anticipates from its romantic 
and legendary fame ; but, being still inaccessible by rail- 
way, it has retained more of a sylvan character than we 
often find in English country towns. In this retired 
neighborhood the road is narrow and bordered with grass, 
and sometimes interrupted by gates ; the hedges grow in 



NEAR OXFORD. 211 

unpruned luxuriance ; there is not that close-shaven neat- 
ness and trimness that characterize the ordinary English 
landscape. The whole scepe conveys the idea of seclu- 
sion and remoteness. We met no travellers, whether 
on foot or otherwise. 

I cannot very distinctly trace out this day's peregrina- 
tions ; but, after leaving Cumnor a few miles behind us, 
I think we came to a ferry over the Thames, where an 
old woman served as ferryman, and pulled a boat across 
by means of a rope stretching from shore to shore. Our 
two vehicles being thus placed on the other side, we re- 
sumed our drive, — first glancing, however, at the old 
woman's antique cottage, with its stone floor, and the cir- 
cular settle round the kitchen fireplace, which was quite 
in the mediaeval English style. 

We next stopped at Stanton Harcourt, where we were 
.received at the parsonage with a hospitality which Ave 
should take delight in describing, if it were allowable to 
make public acknowledgment of the private and personal 
kindnesses which we never failed to find ready for our 
needs. An American in an English house will soon adopt 
the opinion that the English are the very kindest people 
on earth, and will retain that idea as long, at least, as he 
remains on the inner side of the threshold. Their mag- 
netism is of a kind that repels strongly while you keep 
beyond a certain limit, but attracts as forcibly if you get 
within the magic line. 

It was at this place, if I remember right, that I heard 
a srentleman ask a friend of mine whether he was the 
author of " The Red Letter A"; and, after some con- 
sideration, (for he did not seem to recognize his own 
book, at first, under this improved title,) our countryman 



212 NEAR OXFORD. 

responded, doubtfully, that he believed so. The gentle- 
man proceeded to inquire whether our friend had spent 
much time in America, — evidently thinking that he 
must have been caught young, and have had a tincture 
of English breeding, at least, if not birth, to speak the 
language so tolerably, and appear so much like other 
people. This insular narrowness is exceedingly queer, 
and of very frequent occurrence, and is quite as much 
a characteristic of men of education and culture as of 
clowns. 

Stanton Harcourt is a very curious old place. - It was 
formerly the seat of the ancient family of Harcourt, which 
now has its principal abode at Nuneham Courtney, a few 
miles off. The parsonage is a relic of the family man- 
sion, or castle, other portions of which are close at hand ; 
for, across the garden, rise two gray towers, both of them 
picturesquely venerable, and interesting for more than, 
their antiquity. One of these towers, in its entire capa- 
city, from height to depth, constituted the kitchen of the 
ancient castle, and is still used for domestic purposes, 
although it has not, nor ever had, a chimney ; or we 
might rather say, it is itself one vast chimney, with a 
hearth of thirty feet square, and a flue and aperture of 
the same size. There are two huge fireplaces within, 
and the interior walls of the tower are blackened with 
the smoke that for centuries used to gush forth from them, 
and climb upward, seeking an exit through some wide 
air-holes in the conical roof, full seventy feet above. 
These lofty openings were capable of being so arranged, 
with reference to the wind, that the cooks are said to have 
been seldom troubled by the smoke ; and here, no doubt, 
they were accustomed to roast oxen whole, with as little 



NEAR OXFORD. 213 

fuss and ado as a modern cook would roast a fowl. The 
inside of the tower is very dim and sombre, (being noth- 
ing but rough stone walls, lighted only from the apertures 
above mentioned,) and has still a pungent odor of smoke 
and soot, the reminiscence of the fires and feasts of gen- 
erations that have passed away. Methinks the extremest 
range of domestic economy lies between an American 
cooking-stove and the ancient kitchen, seventy dizzy feet 
in height, and all one fireplace, of Stanton Harcourt. 

Now — the place being without a parallel in England, 
and therefore necessarily beyond the experience of an 
American — it is somewhat remarkable, that, while we 
stood gazing at this kitchen, I was haunted and perplexed 
by an idea that somewhere or other I had seen just this 
strange spectacle before.. The height, the blackness, the 
dismal void, before my eyes, seemed as familiar as the 
decorous neatness of my grandmother's kitchen ; only my 
unaccountable memory of the scene was lighted up .with 
an image of lurid fires blazing all round the dim interior 
circuit of the tower. I had never before had so per- 
tinacious an attack, as I could not but suppose it, of that 
odd state of mind wherein we fitfully and teasingly re- 
member some previous scene or incident, of which the 
one now passing appears to be but the echo and redupli- 
cation. Though the explanation of the mystery did not 
for some time occur to me, I may as well conclude the 
matter here.* In a letter of Pope's, addressed to the Duke 
of Buckingham, there is an account of Stanton Harcourt, 
(as I now find, although the name is not mentioned,) 
where he resided while translating a part of the " Iliad." 
It is one of the most admirable pieces of description 
in the language, — playful and picturesque, with fine 



214 NEAR OXFORD. 

i 

touches of humorous pathos, — and conveys as perfect a 
picture as ever was drawn of a decayed English country 
house ; and among other rooms, most of which have since 
crumbled down and disappeared, he dashes off the grim 
aspect of this kitchen, — which, moreover, he peoples with 
witches, engaging Satan himself as head-cook, who stirs 
the infernal caldrons that seethe and bubble over the 
fires. This letter, and others relative to his abode here, 
were very familiar to my earlier reading, and, remaining 
still fresh at the bottom of my memory, caused the weird 
and ghostly sensation that came over me on beholding the 
real spectacle that had formerly been made so vivid to 
my imagination. 

Our next visit was to the church, which stands close 
by, and is quite as ancient as the remnants of the castle. 
In a chapel or side-aisle, dedicated to the Harcourts, are 
found some very interesting family monuments, — and 
among them, recumbent on a tombstone, the figure of an 
armed knight of the Lancastrian party, who was slain in 
the Wars of the Roses. His features, dress, and armor 
are painted in colors, still wonderfully fresh, and there 
still blushes the symbol of the Red Rose, denoting the 
faction for which he fought and died. His head rests on 
a marble or alabaster helmet ; and on the tomb lies the 
veritable helmet, it is to be presumed, which he wore in 
battle, — a ponderous iron case, with the visor complete, 
and remnants of the gilding that once covered it. The 
crest is a large peacock, not of metal, but of wood. 
Very possibly, this helmet was but an heraldic adorn- 
ment of his tomb ; and, indeed, it seems strange that it 
has not been stolen before now, especially in Cromwell's 
time, when knightly tombs were little respected, and 



NEAR OXFORD. 215 

when armor was in request. However, it is needless to 
dispute with the dead knight about the identity of his 
iron pot, and Ave may as well allow it to be the very same 
that so often gave him the headache in his lifetime. 
Leaning against the wall, at the foot of the tomb, is the 
shaft of a spear, with a wofully tattered and utterly faded 
banner appended to it, — the knightly banner beneath 
which lie marshalled his followers in the field. As it 
was absolutely falling to pieces, I tore off one little bit, 
no bigger than a finger-nail, and put it into my waistcoat- 
pocket; but seeking it subsequently, it was not to* be 
found. 

On the opposite side of the little chapel; two or three 
yards from this tomb, is another monument, on which lie, 
side by side, one of the same knightly race of Harcourts, 
and his lady. The tradition of the family is, that this 
knight was the standard-bearer of Henry of Richmond 
in the Battle of Bosworth Field ; and a banner, sup- 
posed to be the same that he carried, now droops over 
Ins effigy. It is just such a colorless silk rag as the one 
already described. The knight has the order of the 
Garter on his knee, and the lady wears it on her left 
arm, — an odd place enough for a garter ; bnt, if worn 
in its proper locality, it could not be decorously visible. 
The complete preservation and good condition of these 
statues, even *lb the minutest adornment of the sculpture, 
and their very noses, — the most vulnerable part of a 
marble man, as of a living one, — are miraculous. Ex- 
cept in Westminster Abbey, among the chapels of the 
kings, I have seen none so well preserved. Perhaps 
they owe it to the loyalty of Oxfordshire, diffused 
throughout its neighborhood by the influence of the 



216 NEAR OXFORD. 

University, during the great Civil War and the rule of 
the Parliament. It speaks well, too, for the upright and 
kindly character of this old family, that the peasantry, 
among whom they had lived for ages, did not desecrate 
their tombs, when it might have been done with im- 
punity. 

There are other and more recent memorials of the 
Harcourts, one of which is the tomb of the last lord, 
who died about a hundred years ago. His figure, like 
those of his ancestors, lies on the top of his tomb, clad, 
not in armor, but in his robes as a peer. The title is 
now extinct, but the family survives in a younger branch, 
and still holds this patrimonial estate, though they have 
long since quitted it as a residence. 

We next went to see the ancient fish-ponds appertain- 
ing to the mansion, and which used to be of vast dietary 
importance to the family in Catholic times, and when 
fish was not otherwise attainable. There are two or 
three, or more, of these reservoirs, one of which is of 
very respectable size, — large enough, indeed, to be really 
a picturesque object, with its grass-green borders, and the 
trees drooping over it, and the towers of the castle and 
the church reflected within the weed-grown depths of its 
smooth mirror. A sweet fragrance, as it were, of ancient 
time and present quiet and seclusion was breathing all 
around ; the sunshine of to-day had a mellow charm of 
antiquity in its brightness. These ponds are said still to 
breed abundance of such fish as love deep and quiet 
waters : but I saw only some minnows, and one or two 
snakes, which were lying among the weeds on the top of 
the water, sunning and bathing themselves at once. 

I mentioned that there were two towers remaining of 



NEAR OXFORD. 217 

the old castle : the one containing the kitchen we have 
already visited ; the other, still more interesting, is next 
to be described. It is some seventy feet high, gray and 
reverend, but in excellent repair, though I could not 
perceive that anything had been done to renovate it. 
The basement story was once the family chapel, and is, 
of course, still a consecrated spot. At one corner of the 
tower is a circular turret, within winch a narrow stair- 
case, with worn steps of stone, winds round and round as 
it climbs upward, giving access to a chamber on each 
floor, and finally emerging on the battlemented roof. 
Ascending this turret-stair, and arriving at the third 
story, we entered a chamber, not large, though occupy- 
ing the whole area of the tower, and lighted by a win- 
dow on each side. It was wainscoted from floor to ceil- 
ing with dark oak, and had a little fireplace in one of the 
corners. The window-panes were small and set in lead. 
The curiosity of this room is, that it was once the resi- 
dence of Pope, and that he here wrote a considerable part 
of the translation of Homer, and likewise, no doubt, the 
admirable letters to which I have referred above. The 
room once contained a record by himself, scratched with 
a diamond on one of the window-panes, (since removed 
for safekeeping to Nuneham Courtney, where it was 
shown me,) purporting that he had here finished the 
fifth book of the " Iliad " on such a day. 

A poet has a fragrance about him, such as no other 
human being is gifted withal ; it is indestructible, and 
clings forevermore to everything that he has touched. I 
was not impressed, at Blenheim, with any sense that the 
mighty Duke still haunted the palace that was created for 
I him ; but here, after a century and a half, we are still con- 



218 NEAR OXFORD. 

scious of the presence of that decrepit little figure of Queen 
Anne's time, although he was merely a casual guest in 
the old tower, during one or two summer months. How- 
ever brief the time and slight the connection, his spirit 
cannot be exorcised so long as the tower stands. In my 
mind, moreover, Pope, or any other person with an avail- 
able claim, is right in adhering to the -spot, dead or alive ; 
for I never saw a chamber that I should like better to 
inhabit, — so comfortably small, in such a safe and inac- 
cessible seclusion, and with a varied landscape from each 
window. One of them looks upon the church, close at 
hand, and down into the green churchyard, extending 
almost to the foot of the tower ; the others have views 
wide and far, over a gently undulating tract of country. 
If desirous of a loftier elevation, about a dozen more 
steps of the turret-stair will bring the occupant to the 
summit of the tower, — where Pope used to come, no 
doubt, in the summer evenings, and peep — poor little 
shrimp that he was ! — through the embrasures of the 
battlement. 

From Stanton Harcourt we drove — I forget how far 
— to a point where a boat was waiting for us upon the 
Thames, or some other stream ; for I am ashamed to con- 
fess my ignorance of the precise geographical wherea- 
bout. We were, at any rate, some miles above Oxford, 
and, I should imagine, pretty near one of the sources of 
England's mighty river. It was little more than wide 
enough for the boat, with extended oars, to pass, — shal- 
low, too, and bordered with bulrushes and water-weeds, 
which, in some places, quite overgrew the surface- of the 
river from bank to bank. The shores were flat and 
meadow-like, and sometimes, the boatman told us, are 



NEAR OXFORD. 219 

overflowed by the rise of the stream. The water looked 
clean and pure, but not particularly transparent, though 
enough so to show us that the bottom is very much weed- 
grown ; and I was told that the weed is an American 
production, brought to England with importations of 
timber, and now threatening to choke up the Thames 
and other English rivers. I wonder it does not try its 
obstructive powers upon the Merrimack, the Connecticut, 
or the Hudson, — not to speak of the St. Lawrence or 
the Mississippi ! 

It was an open boat, with cushioned seats astern, com- 
fortably accommodating our party; the day continued 
sunny and warm, and perfectly still ; the boatman, well 
trained to his business, managed the oars skilfully and 
vigorously ; and we went down the stream quite as swiftly 
as it was desirable to go, the scene being so pleasant, and 
the passing hours so thoroughly agreeable. The river 
grew a little wider and deeper, perhaps, as we glided on, 
but was still an inconsiderable stream : for it had a 
good deal more than a hundred miles to meander through 
before it should bear fleets on its bosom, and reflect pal- 
aces and towers and Parliament houses and dingy and 
sordid piles of various structure, as it rolled to and fro 
with the tide, dividing London asunder. Not, in truth, 
that I ever saw any edifice whatever reflected in its tur- 
bid breast, when the sylvan stream, as we beheld it now, 
is swollen into the Thames at London. 

Once, on our voyage, we had tt> land, while the boat- 
man and some other persons drew our skiff round some 
rapids, which we could not otherwise have passed ; an- 
other time, the boat went through a lock. We, mean- 
while, stepped ashore to examine the ruins of the old 



220 NEAR OXFORD. 

nunnery of Godstowe, where Fair Rosamond secluded 
herself, after being separated from her royal lover. There 
is a long line of ruinous wall, and a shattered tower at 
one of the angles ; the whole much ivy-grown, — brim- 
ming over, indeed, with clustering ivy, which is rooted 
inside of the walls. The nunnery is now, I believe, held 
in lease by the city of Oxford, which has converted its 
precincts into a barnyard. The gate was under lock and 
key, so that we could merely look at the outside, and 
soon resumed our places in the boat. 

At three o'clock, or thereabouts, (or sooner or later, — 
for I took little heed of time, and only wished that these 
delightful wanderings might last forever,) we reached 
Folly Bridge, at Oxford. Here we took possession of a 
spacious barge, with a house in it, and a comfortable 
dining-room or drawing-room within the house, and a 
level roof, on which we could sit at ease, or dance, if so 
inclined. These barges are common at Oxford, — some 
very splendid ones being owned by the students of the 
different colleges, or by clubs. They are drawn by 
horses, like canal-boats ; and a horse being attached to 
our own barge, he trotted off at a reasonable pace, and 
we slipped through the water behind him, with a gentle 
and pleasant motion, which, save for the constant vicissi- 
tude of cultivated scenery, was like no motion at all. It 
was life without the trouble of living ; nothing was ever 
more quietly agreeable. In this happy state of mind 
and body we gazed at Christ- Church meadows,, as we 
passed, and at the receding spires and towers of Oxford, 
and on a good deal of pleasant variety along the banks : 
young men rowing or fishing ; troops of naked boys 
bathing, as if this were Arcadia, in the simplicity of the 



NEAR OXFORD. 221 

Golden Age ; country houses, cottages, water-side inns, 
all with something fresh about them, as not being sprin- 
kled with the dust of the highway. We were a large 
party now ; for a number of additional guests had joined 
us at Folly Bridge, and we comprised poets, novelists, 
scholars, sculptors, painters, architects, men and women 
of renown, dear friends, genial, outspoken, open-hearted 
Englishmen, — all voyaging onward together, like the 
jvise ones of Gotham in a bowl. I remember not a sin- 
gle annoyance, except, indeed, that a swarm of wasps 
came aboard of us and alighted on the head of one of 
our young gentlemen, attracted by the scent of the po- 
matum which he had been rubbing into his hair. He 
was the only victim, and his small trouble the one little 
flaw in our day's felicity, to put us in mind that we were 
mortal. 

Meanwhile a table had been laid in the interior of our 
barge, and spread with cold ham, cold fowl, cold pigeon- 
pie, cold beef, and other substantial cheer, such as the 
English love, and Yankees too, — besides tarts, and cakes, 
and pears, and plums, — not forgetting, of course, a 
goodly provision of port, sherry, and champagne, and 
bitter ale, which is like mother's milk to an Englishman, 
and soon grows equally acceptable to his American 
cousin. By the time these matters had been properly 
attended to, we had arrived at that part of the Thames 
which passes by Nuneham Courtney, a fine estate be- 
longing to the Harcourts, and the present residence of 
the family. Here we landed, and, climbing a steep slope 
from the riverside, paused a moment or two to look at 
an architectural object, called the Carfax, the purport of 
which I do not well understand. Thence we proceeded 



222 NEAR OXFORD. 

onward, through the loveliest park and woodland scenery 
I ever saw, and under as beautiful a declining sunshine 
as heaven ever shed over earth, to the stately mansion- 
house. 

As we here cross a private threshold, it is not allow- 
able to pursue my feeble narrative of this delightful day 
with the same freedom as heretofore ; so, perhaps, I may 
as well bring it to a close. I may mention, however, 
that I saw the library, a fine, large apartment, hung 
round with portraits of eminent literary men, principally 
of the last century, most of whom were familiar guests 
of the Harcourts. The house itself is about eighty years 
old, and is built in the classic style, as if the family had 
been anxious to diverge as far as possible from the Gothic 
picturesqueness of their old abode at Stanton Harcourt. 
The grounds were laid out in part by Capability Brown, 
and seemed to me even more beautiful than those of 
Blenheim. Mason the poet, a friend of the house, gave 
the design of a portion of the garden. Of the whole 
place I will not be niggardly of my rude Transatlantic 
praise, but be bold to say that it appeared to me as per- 
fect as anything earthly can be, — utterly and entirely 
finished, as if the years and generations had done all that 
the hearts and minds of the successive owners could con- 
trive for a spot they dearly loved. Such homes as Nune- 
ham Courtney are among the splendid results of long 
hereditary possession ; and we Republicans, whose house- 
holds melt away like new-fallen snow in a spring morn- 
ing, must content ourselves with our many counterbalan- 
cing advantages, — for this one, so apparently desirable to 
the far-projecting selfishness of our nature, we are certain 
never to attain. 



NEAR OXFORD. 223 

It must not be supposed, nevertheless, that Nuneham 
Courtney is one of the great show-places of England. 
It is merely a fair specimen of the better class of country- 
seats, and has a hundred rivals, and many superiors, in 
the features of beauty, and expansive, manifold, redun- 
dant comfort, which most impressed me. A moderate 
man might be content w r ith such a home, — that is all. 

And now I take leave of Oxford without even an 
attempt to describe it, — there being no literary faculty, 
attainable or conceivable by me, which can avail to put 
it adequately, or even tolerably, upon paper. It must 
remain its own sole expression ; and those whose sad for- 
tune it may be never to behold it have no better resource 
than to dream about gray, weather-stained, ivy-grown 
ediiices, wrought with quaint Gothic ornament, and stand- 
ing around grassy quadrangles, where cloistered walks 
have echoed to the quiet footsteps of twenty generations, 
— lawns and gardens of luxurious repose, shadowed with 
canopies of foliage, and lit up with sunny glimpses 
through archways of great boughs, — spires, towers, and 
turrets, each with its history and legend, — dimly mag- 
nificent chapels, with painted windows of rare beauty and 
brilliantly diversified hues, creating an atmosphere of 
richest gloom, — vast college-halls, high-windowed, oaken- 
panelled, and hung round with portraits of the men, in 
every age, whom the University has nurtured to be 
illustrious, — long vistas of alcoved libraries, where the 
wisdom and learned folly of all time is shelved, — kitch- 
ens, (we throw in this feature by way of ballast, and 
because it would not be English Oxford without its beef 
and beer,) with huge fireplaces, capable of roasting a 
hundred joints at once, — and cavernous cellars, where 



224 NEAR OXFORD. 

rows of piled-up hogsheads seethe and fume with that 
mighty malt-liquor which is the true milk of Alma Ma- 
ter : make all these things vivid in your dream, and you 
will never know nor believe how inadequate is the result 
to represent even the merest outside of Oxford. 

We feel a genuine reluctance to conclude this article 
without making our grateful acknowledgments, by name, 
to a gentleman whose overflowing kindness was the main 
condition of all our sight-seeings and enjoyments. De- 
lightful as will always be our recollection of Oxford and 
its neighborhood, we partly suspect that it owes much of 
its happy coloring to the genial medium through which 
the objects were presented to us, — to the kindly magic 
of a hospitality unsurpassed, within our experience, in 
the quality of making the guest contented with his host, 
with himself, and everything about him. He has insep- 
arably mingled his image with our remembrance of the 
Spires of Oxford. 



SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 

We left Carlisle at a little past eleven, and within the 
half-hour were at Gretna Green. Thence we rushed 
onward into Scotland through a flat and dreary tract of 
country, consisting mainly of desert and bog, where prob- 
ably the moss-troopers were accustomed , to take refuge 
after their raids into England. Anon, however, the 
hills hove themselves up to view, occasionally attaining 
a height which might almost be called mountainous. In 
about two hours we reached Dumfries, and alighted at 
the station there. 

Chill as the Scottish summer is reputed to be, we 
found it an awfully hot day, not a whit less so than the 
day before ; but we sturdily adventured through the burn- 
ing sunshine up into the town, inquiring our way to the 
residence of Burns. The street leading from the station 
is called Shakspeare Street ; and at its farther extremity 
we read "Burns Street" on a corner-house, — the avenue 
thus designated having been formerly known as " Mill- 
Hole Brae." It is a vile lane, paved with small, hard 
stones from side to side, and bordered by cottages or 
mean houses of whitewashed stone, joining one to an- 
other along the whole length of the street. With not a 
tree, of course, or a blade of glass between the paving- 
stones, the narrow lane was as hot as Tophet, and reeked 
15 



226 SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 

with a genuine Scotch odor, being infested with unwashed 
children, and altogether in a state of chronic filth ; al- 
though some women seemed to be hopelessly scrubbing 
the thresholds of their wretched dwellings. I never saw 
an outskirt of a town less fit for a poet's residence, or in 
which it would be more miserable for anf man of cleanly 
predilections to spend his days. 

We asked for Burns's dwelling ; and a woman pointed 
across the street to a two-story house, built of stone, and 
whitewashed, like its neighbors, but perhaps of a little 
more respectable aspect than most of them, though I 
hesitate in saying so. It was not a separate structure, 
but under the same continuous roof with the next. 
There was an inscription on the door, bearing no refer- 
ence to Burns, but indicating that the house was now 
occupied by a ragged or industrial school. On knocking, 
we were instantly admitted by a servant-girl, who smiled 
intelligently when we told our errand, and showed us 
into a low and very plain parlor, not more than twelve or 
fifteen feet square. A young woman, who seemed to be 
a teacher in the school, soon appeared, and told us that 
this had been Burns's usual sitting-room, and that he had 
written many of his songs here. 

She then led us up a narrow staircase into a little bed- 
chamber over the parlor. Connecting with it, there is a 
very small room, or windowed closet, which Burns used 
as a study; and the bedchamber itself was the one 
where he slept in his later lifetime, and in which he 
died at last. Altogether, it is an exceedingly unsuitable 
place for a pastoral and rural poet to live or die in, — 
even more unsatisfactory than Shakspeare's house, which 
has a certain homely picturesqueness that contrasts favor- 



SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 227 

ably with .the suburban sordidness of the abode before us. 
The narrow lane, the paving-stones, and the contiguity 
of wretched hovels are depressing to remember ; and the 
steam of them (such is our human weakness) might 
almost make the poet's memory less fragrant. 

As already observed, it was an intolerably hot day. 
After leaving the house, we found our way into the prin- 
cipal street of the town, which, it may be fair to say, is 
of very different aspect from the wretched outskirt above 
described. Entering a hotel, (in which, as a Dumfries 
guide-book assured us, Prince Charles Edward had once 
spent a night,) we rested and refreshed ourselves, and 
then set forth in quest of the mausoleum of Burns. 

Coming to St. Michael's Church, we saw a man dig- 
ging a grave , and, scrambling out of the hole, he let us 
into the churchyard, which was crowded full of monu- 
ments. Their general shape and construction are pecu- 
liar to Scotland, being a perpendicular tablet of marble 
or other stone, within a framework of the same material, 
somewhat resembling the frame of a looking-glass ; and, 
all over the churchyard, these sepulchral memorials rise 
to the height of ten, fifteen, or twenty feet, forming quite 
an imposing collection of monuments, but inscribed with 
names of small general significance. It was easy, indeed, 
to ascertain the rank of those who slept below ; for in 
Scotland it is the custom to put the occupation of the 
buried personage (as " Skinner," " Shoemaker," " Flesh- 
er") on his tombstone. As another peculiarity, wives 
are buried under their maiden names, instead of those 
of their husbands ; thus giving a disagreeable impression 
that the married pair have bidden each other an eternal 
farewell on the edge of the grave. 



228 SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 

There was a footpath through this crowded church- 
yard, sufficiently well worn to guide us to the grave of 
Burns ; but a woman followed behind us, who, it ap- 
peared, kept the key of the mausoleum, and was privi- 
leged to show it to strangers. The monument is a sort 
of Grecian temple, with pilasters and a dome, covering a 
space of about twenty feet square. It was formerly open 
to all the inclemencies of the Scotch atmosphere, but is 
now protected and shut in by large squares of rough 
glass, each pane being of the size of one whole side of 
the structure. The woman unlocked the door, and ad- 
mitted us into the interior. Inlaid into the floor of the 
mausoleum is the gravestone of Burns, — the very same 
that was laid over his grave by Jean Armour, before this 
monument was built. Displayed against the surrounding 
wall is a marble statue of Burns at the plough, with the 
Genius of Caledonia summoning the ploughman to turn 
poet. Methought it was not a very successful piece of 
work ; for the plough was better sculptured than the 
man, and the man, though heavy and cloddish, was more 
effective than the goddess. Our guide informed us that 
an old man of ninety, who knew Burns, certifies this 
statue to be very like the original. ' - 

The bones of the poet, and of Jean Armour, and of 
some of their children, lie in the vault over which we 
stood. Our guide (who was intelligent, in her own plain 
way, and very agreeable to talk withal) said that the 
vault was opened about three weeks ago, on occasion of 
the burial of the eldest son of Burns. The poet's bones 
were disturbed, and the dry skull, once so brimming over 
with powerful thought and bright and tender fantasies, 
was taken away, and kept for several days by a Dumfries 



SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 229 

doctor. It has since been deposited in a new leaden 
coffin, and restored to the vault. We learned that there 
is a surviving daughter of Burns's eldest son, and daugh- 
ters likewise of the two younger sons, — and, besides 
these, an illegitimate posterity by the eldest son, who 
appears to have been of disreputable life in his younger 
days. He inherited his father's failings, with some faint 
shadow, I have also understood, of the great qualities 
which have made the world tender of his father's vices 
and weaknesses. 

We listened readily enough to this paltry gossip, but 
found that it robbed the poet's memory of some of the 
reverence that was its due. Indeed, this talk over his 
grave had very much the same tendency and effect 
as the home-scene of his life, which we had been visit- 
ing just previously. Beholding his poor, mean dwelling 
and its surroundings, and picturing his outward- life and 
earthly manifestations from these, one does not so much 
wonder that the people of that day should have failed to 
recognize all that was admirable and immortal in a dis- 
reputable, drunken, shabbily clothed, and shabbily housed 
man, consorting with associates of damaged character, 
and, as his only ostensible occupation, gauging the whiskey, 
which be too often tasted. Siding with Burns, as we 
needs must, in his plea against the world, let us try to do 
the world a little justice too. It is far easier to know 
and honor a poet when his fame has taken shape in the 
spotlessness of marble than when the actual man comes 
staggering before you, besmeared with the sordid stains 
of his daily life. For my part, I chiefly wonder that his 
recognition dawned so brightly while he was still living. 
There must have been something very grand in his im- 



230 SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 

mediate presence, some strangely impressive characteris- 
tic in his natural behavior, to have caused him to seem 
like a demigod so soon. 

As we went back through the churchyard, we saw a 
spot where nearly four hundred inhabitants of Dumfries 
were buried during the cholera year ; and also some curi- 
ous old monuments, with raised letters, the inscriptions on 
which were not sufficiently legible to induce us to puzzle 
them out ; but, I believe, they mark the resting-places of 
old Covenanters, some of whom were killed by Claver- 
house and his fellow-ruffians. 

St. Michael's Church is of red freestone, and was built 
about a hundred years ago, on an old Catholic foundation. 
Our guide admitted us into it, and showed us, in the 
porch, a very pretty little marble figure of a child asleep, 
with a drapery over the lower part, from beneath which 
appeared its two baby feet. It was truly a sweet little 
statue ; and the woman told us that it represented a child 
of the sculptor, and that the baby (here still in its marble 
infancy) had died more than twenty-six years ago. 
" Many ladies," she said, " especially such as had ever lost 
a child, had shed tears over it." It was very pleasant to 
think of the sculptor bestowing the best of his genius and 
art to re-create his tender child in stone, and to make the 
representation as soft and sweet as the original ; but the 
conclusion of the story has something that jars with our 
awakened sensibilities. A gentleman from London had 
seen the statue, and was so much delighted with it that 
he bought it of the father-artist, after it had lain above 
a quarter of a century in the church-porch. So this 
was not the real, tender image that came out of the 
father's heart ; he had sold that truest one for a hun- 



SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 231 

dred guineas, and sculptored this mere copy to replace it. 
The first figure was entirely naked in its earthly and 
spiritual innocence. The copy, as I have said above, has 
a drapery over the lower limbs. But, after all, if we 
come to the truth of the matter, the sleeping baby may 
be as fitly reposited in the drawing-room of a connoisseur 
as in a cold and dreary church-porch. 

We went into the church, and found it very plain and 
naked, without altar-decorations, and having its floor quite 
covered with unsightly wooden pews. The woman led us 
to a pew cornering on one of the side-aisles, and, telling 
us that it used to be Burns's family-pew, showed us his 
seat, which is in the corner by the aisle. It is so situated, 
that a sturdy pillar hid him from the pulpit, and from the 
minister's eye ; " for Robin was no great friends with the 
ministers," said she. This touch — his seat behind the 
pillar, and Burns himself nodding in sermon-time, or 
keenly observant of profane things — brought him before 
us to the life. In the corner-seat of the next pew, right 
before Burns, and not more than two feet off, sat the 
young lady on whom the poet saw that unmentionable 
parasite which he has immortalized in song. We were 
ungenerous enough to ask the lady's name, but the good 
woman could not tell it. This was the last thing which 
we saw in Dumfries worthy of record ; and it ought to 
be noted that our guide refused some money which my 
companion offered her, because I had already paid her 
what she deemed sufficient. 

At the railway station we spent more than a weary 
hour, waiting for the train, which at last came up, and 
took us to Mauchline. We got into an omnibus, the only 
conveyance to be had, and drove about a mile to the vil- 



232 Some of the haunts of burns. 

lage, where we established ourselves at the Loudoun 
Hotel, one of the veriest country inns which we have 
found in Great Britain. The town of Mauchline, a place 
more redolent of Burns than almost any other, consists of 
a street or two of contiguous cottages, mostly white- 
washed, and with thatched roofs. It has nothing sylvan 
or rural in the immediate village, and is as ugly a place 
as mortal man could contrive to make, or to render uglier 
through a succession of untidy generations. The fashion 
of paving the village street, and patching one shabby 
house on the gable-end of another, quite shuts out all 
verdure and pleasantness ; but, I presume, we are not 
likely to see a more genuine old Scotch village, such as 
they used to be in Burns's time, and long before, than this 
of Mauchline. The church stands about midway up the 
street, and is built of red freestone, very simple in its 
architecture, with a square tower and pinnacles. In this 
sacred edifice, and its churchyard, was the scene of one 
of Burns's most characteristic productions, "The Holy 
Fair." 

Almost directly opposite its gate, across the village 
street, stands Posie Nansie's inn, where the " Jolly Beg- 
gars " congregated. The latter is a two-story, red-stone, 
thatched house, looking old, but by no means venerable, 
like a drunken patriarch. It has small, old-fashioned 
windows, and may well have stood for centuries, — 
though, seventy or eighty years ago, when Burns was 
conversant with it, I should fancy it might have been 
something better than a beggars' alehouse. The whole 
town of Mauchline looks rusty and time-worn, — even 
the newer houses, of which there are several, being shad- 
owed and darkened by the general aspect of the place. 



SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 233 

When we arrived, all the wretched little dwellings seemed 
to have belched forth their inhabitants into the warm 
summer evening ; everybody was chatting with every- 
body, on the most familiar terms ; the bare-legged chil- 
dren gambolled or quarrelled uproariously, and came 
freely, moreover, and looked into the window of our par- 
lor. When we ventured out, we were followed by the 
gaze of the old town : people standing in their doorways, 
old women popping their heads from the chamber-win- 
dows, and stalwart men — idle on Saturday at e'en, after 
their week's hard labor — clustering at the street-corners, 
merely to stare at our unpretending selves. Except in 
some remote little town of Italy, (where, besides, the 
inhabitants had the intelligible stimulus of beggary,) I 
have never been honored with nearly such an amount of 
public notice. 

The next forenoon my companion put me to shame by 
attending church, after vainly exhorting me to do the like ; 
and, it being Sacrament Sunday, and my poor friend be- 
ing wedged into the farther end of a closely filled pew, 
he was forced to stay through the preaching of four sev- 
eral sermons, and came back perfectly exhausted and des- 
perate. He was somewhat consoled, however, on finding 
that he had witnessed a spectacle of Scotch manners 
identical with that of Burns's " Holy Fair," on the very 
spot where the poet located that immortal description. 
By way of further conformance to the customs of the 
country, we ordered a sheep's head and the broth, and did 
penance accordingly ; and at five o'clock we took a fly, 
and set out for Burns's farm of Moss Giel. 

Moss Giel is not more than a mile from Mauchline, 
and the road extends over a high ridge of land, with a 



234 SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 

view of far hills and green slopes on either side. Just 
before we reached the farm, the driver stopped to point 
out a hawthorn, growing by the wayside, which he said 
was Burns's " Lousie Thorn ; " and I devoutly plucked 
a branch, although I have really forgotten where or how 
this illustrious shrub has been celebrated. We then 
turned into a rude gateway, and almost immediately 
came to the farm-house of Moss Giel, standing some fifty 
yards removed from the high-road, behind a tall hedge 
of hawthorn, and considerably overshadowed by trees. 
The house is a whitewashed stone cottage, like thousands 
of others in England and Scotland, with a thatched roof, 
on which grass and weeds have intruded a picturesque, 
though alien growth. There is a door and one window 
in front, besides another little window that peeps out 
among the thatch. Close by the cottage, and extending 
back at right angles from it, so as to inclose the farm- 
yard, are two other buildings of the same size, shape, and 
general appearance as the house : any one of the three 
looks just as fit for a human habitation as the two others, 
and all three look still more suitable for donkey-stables 
and pigsties. As we drove into the farm-yard, bounded 
on three sides by these three hovels, a large dog began 
to bark at us ; and some women and children made their 
appearance, but seemed to demur about admitting us, 
because the master and mistress were very religious 
people, and had not yet come back from the Sacrament 
at Mauchline. 

However, it would not do to be turned back from the 
very threshold of Robert Burns ; and as the women 
seemed to be merely straggling visitors, and nobody, at 
all events, had a right to send us away, we went into the 



SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 235 

back-door, and, turning to the right, entered a kitchen. It 
showed a deplorable lack of housewifely neatness, and in 
it there were three or four children, one of whom, a girl 
eight or nine years old, held a baby in her arms. She 
proved to be the daughter of the people of the house, and 
gave us what leave she could to look about us. Thence 
we stepped across the narrow mid-passage of the cottage 
into the only other apartment below-stairs, a sitting-room, 
where we found a young man eating bread and cheese. 
He informed us that he did not live there, and had only 
called in to refresh himself on his way home from church. 
This room, like the kitchen, was a noticeably poor one, 
and, besides being all that the cottage had to show for a 
parlor, it was a sleeping-apartment, having two beds, 
which might be curtained off, on occasion. The young 
man allowed us liberty (so far as in him lay) to go up- 
stairs. Up we crept, accordingly ; and a few steps 
brought us to the top of the staircase, over the kitchen, 
where we found the wretchedest little sleeping-chamber 
in the world, with a sloping roof under the thatch, and 
two beds spread upon the bare floor. This, most prob- 
ably, was Burns's chamber ; or, perhaps, it may have 
been that of his mother's servant-maid ; and, in either 
case, this rude floor, at one time or another, must have 
creaked beneath the poet's midnight tread. On the oppo- 
site side of the passage was the door of another attic 
chamber, opening which, I saw a considerable number 
of cheeses on the floor. 

The whole house was pervaded with a frowzy smell, 
and also a dunghill odor : and it is not easy to understand 
how the atmosphere of such a dwelling can be any more 
agreeable or salubrious morally than it appeared to be 



236 SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 

physically. No virgin, surely, could keep a holy awe 
about her while stowed higgledy-piggledy with coarse- 
natured rustics into this narrowness and filth. Such a 
habitation is calculated to make beasts of men and women ; 
and it indicates a degree of barbarism which I did not 
imagine to exist in Scotland, that a tiller of broad fields, 
like the farmer of Mauchline, should have his abode in a 
pigsty. It is sad to think of anybody — not to say a 
poet, but any human being — sleeping, eating, thinking, 
praying, and spending all his home-life in this miser- 
able hovel ; but, methinks, I never in the least knew 
how to estimate the miracle of Burns's genius, nor 
his heroic merit for being no worse man, until I thus 
learned the squalid hindrances amid which he developed 
himself. Space, a free atmosphere, and cleanliness 
have a vast yleal to do with the possibilities of human 
virtue. 

The biographers talk of the farm of Moss Giel as being 
damp and unwholesome ; but I do not see why, outside 
of the cottage walls, it should possess so evil a reputation. 
It occupies a high, broad ridge, enjoying, surely, what- 
ever benefit can come of a breezy site, and sloping far 
downward before any marshy soil is reached. The high 
hedge, and the trees that stand beside the cottage, give 
it a pleasant aspect enough to one who does not know the 
grimy secrets of the interior ; and the summer afternoon 
was now so bright that I shall remember the scene with 
a great deal of sunshine over it. 

Leaving the cottage, we drove through a field, which 
the driver told us was that in which Burns turned up the 
mouse's nest. It is the inclosure nearest to the cottage, 
and seems now to be a pasture, and a rather remark- 



SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 237 

ably unfertile one. A little farther on, the ground was 
whitened with an immense number of daisies, — daisies, 
daisies everywhere ; and in answer to my inquiry, the 
driver said that this was the field where Burns ran his 
ploughshare over the daisy. If so, the soil seems to have 
been consecrated to daisies by the song which he bestowed 
on that first immortal one. I alighted, and plucked a 
whole handful of these "wee, modest, crimson-tipped 
flowers," which will be precious to many friends in our 
own country as coming from Burns's farm, and being 
of the same race and lineage as that daisy which he 
turned into an amaranthine flower while seeming to de- 
stroy it. 

From Moss Giel we drove through a variety of pleas- 
ant scenes, some of which were familiar to us by their 
connection with Burns. We skirted, too, ajpng a portion 
of the estate of Auchinleck, which still belongs to the 
Boswell family, — the present possessor being Sir James 
Boswell,* a grandson of Johnson's friend, and son of the 
Sir Alexander who was killed in a duel. Our driver 
spoke of Sir James as a kind, free-hearted man, but 
addicted to horse-races and similar pastimes, and a little 
too familiar with the wine-cup ; so that poor Bozzy's 
booziness would appear to have become hereditary in 
his ancient line. There is no m^ heir to the estate 
of Auchinleck. The portion of the lands which we 
saw is covered with wood and much undermined with 
rabbit-warrens ; nor, though' the territory extends over 
a large number of acres, is the income very consider- 
able. 

By and by we came to the spot where Burns saw Miss 
* Sir James Boswell is now dead. 



238 SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 

Alexander, the Lass of Ballochmyle. It was on a bridge, 
which (or, more probably, a bridge that has succeeded to 
the old one, and is made of iron) crosses from bank to 
bank, high in air, over a deep gorge of the road ; so that 
the young lady may have appeared to Burns like a crea- 
ture between earth and sky, and compounded chiefly of 
celestial elements. But, in honest truth, the great charm 
of a woman, in Burns's eyes, was always her womanhood, 
and not the angelic mixture which other poets find 
in her. 

Our driver pointed out the course taken by the Lass 
of Ballochmyle, through the shrubbery, to a rock on the 
banks of the Lugar, where it seems to be the tradition 
that Burns accosted her. The song implies no such inter- 
view. Lovers, of whatever condition, high or low, could 
desire no lovelier scene in which to breathe their vows : 
the river flowing over its pebbly bed, sometimes gleaming 
into the sunshine, sometimes hidden deep in verdure, and 
here and there eddying at the foot of high and precipitous 
cliffs. This beautiful estate of Ballochmyle is still held 
by the family of Alexanders, to whom Burns's song has 
given renown on cheaper terms than any other set of 
people ever attained it. How slight the tenure seems ! 
A young lady happened to walk out, one summer after- 
noon, and crossed the^ath of a neighboring farmer, who 
celebrated the little incident in four or five warm, rude, 
— at least, not refined, though rather ambitious, — and 
somewhat ploughman-like verses. Burns has written 
hundreds of better things ; but henceforth, for centuries, 
that maiden has free admittance into the dream-land of 
Beautiful Women, and she and all her race are famous ! 
I should like to know the present head of the family, and 



SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 239 

ascertain what value, if any, the members of it put upon 
the celebrity thus won. 

We passed through Catrine, known hereabouts as " the 
clean village of Scotland." Certainly, as regards the 
point indicated, it has greatly the advantage of Mauch- 
line, whither we now returned without seeing anything 
else worth writing about. 

There was a rain-storm during the night, and, in the 
morning, the rusty, old, sloping street of Mauchline was 
glistening with wet, while frequent showers came spatter- 
ing down. The intense heat of many days past was ex- 
changed for a chilly atmosphere, much more suitable to a 
stranger's idea of what Scotch temperature ought to be. 
We found, after breakfast, that the first train northward 
had already gone by, and that Ave must wait till nearly 
two o'clock for the next. I merely ventured out once, 
during the forenoon, and took a brief walk through the 
village, in which I have left little to describe. Its chief 
business appears to be the manufacture of snuff-boxes. 
There are perhaps five or six shops, or more, including 
those licensed to sell only tea and tobacco ; the best of 
them have the characteristics of village stores in the United 
States, dealing in a small way with an extensive variety 
of articles. I peeped into the open gateway of the 
churchyard, and saw that the ground was absolutely 
stuffed with dead people, and the surface crowded with 
gravestones, both perpendicular and horizontal. All 
Burns's old Mauchline acquaintance are doubtless there, 
and the Armours among them, except Bonny Jean, who 
sleeps by her poet's side. The family of Armour is now 
extinct in Mauchline. 

Arriving at the railway station, we found a tall, elderly, 



240 SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 

comely gentleman walking to and fro and waiting for the 
train. He proved to be a Mr. Alexander, — it may fairly 
be presumed the Alexander of Ballochmyle, a blood rela- 
tion of the lovely lass. Wonderful efficacy of a poet's 
verse, that could shed a glory from Long Ago on this old 
gentleman's white hair ! These Alexanders, by the by, 
are not an old family on the Ballochmyle estate ; the 
father of the lass having made a fortune in trade, and 
established himself as the first landed proprietor of his 
name in these parts. The original family was named 
Whitefoord. 

Our ride to Ayr presented nothing very remarkable ; 
and, indeed, a cloudy and rainy day takes the varnish off 
the scenery, and causes a woful diminution in the beauty 
and impressiveness of everything we see. Much of our 
way lay along a flat, sandy level, in a southerly direction. 
We reached Ayr in the midst of hopeless rain, and drove 
to the King's Arms Hotel. In the intervals of showers 
I took peeps at the town, which appeared to have many 
modern or modern-fronted edifices ; although there are 
likewise tall, gray, gabled, and quaint-looking houses in 
the by-streets, here and there, betokening an ancient place. 
The town lies on both sides of the Ayr, which is here 
broad and stately, and bordered with dwellings that 
look from their windows directly down into the passing 
tide. 

I crossed the river by a modern and handsome stone 
bridge, and recrossed it, at no great distance, by a vener- 
able structure of four gray arches, which must have be- 
stridden the stream ever since the early days of Scottish 
history. These are the " Two Briggs of Ayr," whose 
midnight conversation was overheard by Burns, while 



SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 241 

other auditors were aware only of the rush and rumble 
of the wintry stream among the arches. The ancient 
bridge is steep and narrow, and paved like a street, and 
defended by a parapet of red freestone, except at the 
two ends, where some mean old shops allow scanty room 
for the pathway to creep between. Nothing else im- 
pressed me hereabouts, unless I mention, that, during the 
rain, the women and girls went about the streets of Ayr 
barefooted to save their shoes. 

The next morning wore a lowering aspect, as if it felt 
itself destined to be one of many consecutive days of 
storm. After a good Scotch breakfast, however, of fresh 
herrings and eggs, we took a fly, and started at a little 
'past ten for the banks of the Doon. On our way, at 
about two miles from Ayr, we drew up at a roadside cot- 
tage, on which was an inscription to the effect that Robert 
Burns was bom within its walls. It is now a public- 
house ; and, of course, we alighted and entered its little 
sitting-room, which, as we at present see it, is a neat 
apartment, with the modern improvement of a ceiling. 
The walls are much overscribbled with names of visitors, 
and the wooden door of a cupboard in the wainscot, as 
well as all the other wood-work of the room, is cut and 
carved with initial letters. So, likewise, are two tables, 
which, having received a coat of varnish over the inscrip- 
tions, form really curious and interesting articles of fur- 
niture. I have seldom (though I do not personally 
adopt this mode of illustrating my humble name) felt 
inclined to ridicule the natural impulse of most people 
thus to record themselves at the shrines of poets and 
heroes. 

On a panel, let into the wall in a corner of the room, is 
16 



242 SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF .BURNS. 

a portrait of Burns, copied from the original picture by 
Nasmyth. The floor of this apartment is of boards, 
which are probably a recent substitute for the ordinary 
flag-stones of a peasant's cottage. There is but one other 
room pertaining to the genuine birthplace of Robert 
Burns : it is the kitchen, into which we now went. It 
has a floor of flag-stones, even ruder than those of Shak- 
speare's house, — though, perhaps, not so strangely cracked 
and broken as the latter, over which the hoof of Satan 
himself might seem to. have been trampling. A new 
window has been opened through the wall, towards the 
road ; but on the opposite side is the little original win- 
dow, of only four small panes, through which came the 
first daylight that shone upon the Scottish poet. At the 
side of the room, opposite the fireplace, is a recess, con- 
taining a bed, which can be hidden by curtains. In that 
humble nook, of all places in the world, Providence was 
pleased to deposit the germ of the richest human life 
which mankind then had within its circumference. 

These two rooms, as I have said, make up the whole 
sum and substance of Burns's birthplace : for there were 
no chambers, nor even attics ; and the thatched roof 
formed the only ceiling of kitchen and sitting-room, the 
height of which was that of the whole house. The cot- 
tage, however, is attached to another edifice of the same 
size and description, as these little habitations often are ; 
and, moreover, a splendid addition has been made to it. 
since the poet's renown began to draw visitors to the way- 
side ale-house. The old woman of the house led us 
through an entry, and showed a vaulted hall, of no vast 
dimensions, to be sure, but marvellously large and splen- 
did as compared with what might be anticipated from the 



SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 243 

outward aspect of the cottage. It contained a bust of 
Burns, and was bung round with pictures and engravings, 
principally illustrative of his life and poems. In this 
part of the house, too, there is a parlor, fragrant with 
tobacco-smoke ; and, no doubt, many a noggin of whiskey 
is here quaffed to the memory of the bard, who professed 
to draw so much inspiration from that potent liquor. 

We bought some engravings of Kirk Alloway, the 
Bridge of Doon, and the monument, and gave the old 
woman a fee besides, and took our leave. A very short 
drive farther brought us within sight of the monument, 
and to the hotel, situated close by the entrance of the 
ornamental grounds within which the former is enclosed. 
^Ve rang the bell at the gate of the enclosure, but were 
forced to wait a considerable time ; because the old man, 
the regular superintendent of the spot, had gone to assist 
at the laying of the corner-stone of a new kirk. He 
appeared anon, and admitted us, but immediately hurried 
away to be present at the concluding ceremonies, leaving 
us locked up with Burns. 

The enclosure around the monument is beautifully laid 
out as an ornamental garden, and abundantly provided 
with rare flowers and shrubbery, all tended with loving 
care. The monument stands on an elevated site, and 
consists of a massive basement-story, three-sided, above 
which rises a light and elegant Grecian temple, — a mere 
dome, supported on Corinthian pillars, and open to all the 
winds. The edifice is beautiful in itself; though I know 
not what peculiar appropriateness it may have, as the 
memorial of a Scottish rural poet. 

The door of the basement story stood open ; and, en- 
tering, we saw a bust of Burns in a niche, looking keener, 



244 SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 

more refined, but not so warm and whole-souled as his 
pictures usually do. I think the likeness cannot be good. 
In the centre of the room stood a glass case, in which were 
reposited the two volumes of the little Pocket Bible that 
Burns gave to Highland Mary, when they pledged their 
troth to one another. It is poorly printed, on coarse 
paper. A verse of Scripture, referring to the solemnity 
and awfulness of vows, is written within the cover of 
each volume, in the poet's own hand ; and fastened to 
one of the covers is a lock of Highland Mary's golden 
hair. This Bible had been carried to America by one 
of her relatives, but was sent back to be fitly treasured 
here. 

There is a staircase within the monument, by which 
we ascended to the top, and had a view of both Briggs 
of Doon ; the scene of Tam O'Shanter's misadventure 
being close at hand. Descending, we wandered through 
the enclosed garden, and came to a little building in a 
corner, on entering which, we found the two statues of 
Tam and Sutor Wat, — ponderous stone-work enough, 
yet permeated in a remarkable degree with living warmth 
and jovial hilarity. From this part of the garden, too, 
we again beheld the old Brigg of Doon, over which Tam 
galloped in such imminent and awful peril. It is a 
beautiful object in the landscape, with one high, graceful 
arch, ivy-grown, and shadowed all over and around with 
foliage. 

When we had waited a good while, the old gardener 
came, telling us that he had heard an excellent prayer 
at laying the corner-stone of the new kirk. He now 
gave us some roses and sweetbrier, and let us out from 
his pleasant garden. We immediately hastened to v Kirk 



SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 245 

Alloway, which is within two or three minutes' walk of 
the monument. A few steps ascend from the roadside, 
through a gate, into the old graveyard, in the midst of 
which stands the kirk. The edifice is wholly roofless, 
but the side-walls and gable-ends are quite entire, though 
portions of them are evidently modern restorations. 
Never was there a plainer little church, or one with 
smaller architectural pretension ; no New England meet- 
ing-house has more simplicity in its very self, though 
poetry and fun have clambered and clustered so wildly 
over Kirk Alloway that it is difficult to see it as it actu- 
ally exists. By the by, I do not understand why Satan 
and an assembly of witches should hold their revels 
within a consecrated precinct ; but the weird scene has 
so established itself in the world's imaginative faith 
that it must be accepted as an authentic incident, in 
spite of rule and reason to the contrary. Possibly, 
some carnal minister, some priest of pious aspect and 
hidden infidelity, had dispelled the consecration of the 
holy edifice by his pretence of prayer, and thus made 
it the resort of unhappy ghosts and sorcerers and devils. 

The interior of the kirk, even now, is applied to quite 
as impertinent a purpose as when Satan and the witches 
used it as a dancing-hall ; for it is divided in the midst 
by a wall of stone masonry, and each compartment has 
been converted into a family burial-place. The name on 
one of the monuments is Crawfurd ; the other bore no 
inscription. It is impossible not to feel that these good 
people, whoever they may be, had no business to thrust 
their prosaic bones into a spot that belongs to the world, 
and where their presence jars with the emotions, be they 
sad or gay, which the pilgrim brings thither. They shut 



246 SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 

us out from our own precincts, too, — from that inalien- 
able possession which Burns bestowed in free gift upon 
mankind, by taking it from the actual earth and annexing 
it to the domain of imagination. And here these wretched 
squatters have lain down to their long sleep, after barring 
each of the two doorways of the kirk with an iron grate ! 
May their rest be troubled, till they rise and let us in ! 

Kirk Alloway is inconceivably small, considering how 
large a space it fills in our imagination before we see it. 
I paced its length, outside of the wall, and found it only 
seventeen of my paces, and not more than ten of them 
in breadth. There seem to have been but very few 
windows, all of which, if I rightly remember, are now 
blocked up with mason-work of stone. One mullioned 
window, tall and narrow, in the eastern gable, might 
have been seen by Tarn O'Shanter, blazing with dev- 
ilish light, as he approached along the road from Ayr ; 
and there is a small and square one, on the side nearest 
the road, into which he might have peered, as he sat on 
horseback. Indeed, I could easily have looked through 
it, standing on the ground, had jiot the opening been 
walled up. There is an odd kind of belfry at the peak 
of one of the gables, with the small bell still hanging in it. 
And this is all that I remember of Kirk Alloway, except 
that the stones of its material are gray and irregular. 

The road from Ayr passes Alloway Kirk, and crosses 
the Doon by a modern bridge, without swerving much 
from a straight line. To reach the old bridge, it appears 
to have made a bend, shortly after passing the kirk, and 
then to have turned sharply towards the river. The new 
bridge is within a minute's walk of the monument ; and 
we went thither, and leaned over its parapet to admire 



SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS. 247 

the beautiful Doon, flowing wildly and sweetly between 
its deep and wooded banks. I never saw a lovelier 
scene ; although this might have been even lovelier, if a 
kindly sun had shone upon it. The ivy-grown, ancient 
bridge, with its high arch, through which we had a pic- 
ture of the river and the green banks beyond, was abso- 
lutely the most picturesque object, in a quiet and gentle 
way, that ever blessed my eyes. Bonny Doon, with its 
wooded banks, and the boughs dipping into the water ! 
The memory of them, at this moment, affects me like the 
song of birds, and Burns crooning some verses, simple 
and wild, in accordance with their native melody. 

It was impossible to depart without crossing the very 
bridge of Tarn's adventure ; so we went thither, over a 
now disused portion of the road, and, standing on the 
centre of the arch, gathered some ivy-leaves from that 
sacred spot. This done, we returned as speedily as might 
be to Ayr, whence, taking the rail, we soon beheld Ailsa 
Craig rising like a pryamid out of the sea. Drawing 
nearer to Glasgow, Ben Lomond hove in sight, with a 
dome-like summit, supported by a shoulder on each side. 
But a man is better than a mountain ; and we had been 
holding intercourse, if not with the reality, at least with 
the stalwart ghost of one of Earth's memorable sons, 
amid the scenes where he lived and sung. "We shall 
appreciate him better as a poet, hereafter ; for there is 
no writer whose life, as a man, has so much to do with 
his fame, and throws such a necessary light upon what- 
ever he has produced. Henceforth, there will be a per- 
sonal warmth for us in everything that he wrote ; and, 
like his countrymen, we shall know him in a kind of 
personal way, as if we had shaken hands with him, and 
felt the thrill of his actual voice. 



A LONDON SUBURB. 

One of our English summers looks, in the retrospect, 
as if it had been patched with more frequent sunshine 
than the sky of England ordinarily affords; but I be- 
lieve that it may be only a moral effect, — a " light that 
never was on sea nor land," — caused by our having found 
a particularly delightful abode in the neighborhood of 
London. In order to enjoy it, however, I was compelled 
to solve the problem of living in two places at once, — 
an impossibility which I so far accomplished as to vanish, 
at frequent intervals, out of men's sight and knowledge 
on one side of England, and take my place in a circle of 
familiar faces on the other, so quietly that I seemed to 
have been there all along. It was the easier to get 
accustomed to our new residence, because it was not only 
rich in all the material properties of a home, but had also 
the home-like atmosphere, the household element, which 
is of too intangible a character to be let even with the 
most thoroughly furnished lodging-house. A friend had 
given us his suburban residence, with all its conven- 
iences, elegances, and snuggeries, — its drawing-rooms 
and library, still warm and bright with the recollection 
of the genial presences that we had known there, — its 
closets, chambers, kitchen, and even its wine-cellar, if we 
could have availed ourselves of so dear and delicate a 



A LONDON SUBURB. 249 

trust, — its lawn and cosey garden-nooks, and whatever 
else makes up the multitudinous idea of an English 
home, — he had transferred it all to us, pilgrims and 
dusty wayfarers, that we might rest and take our ease 
during his summer's absence on the Continent. We had 
long been dwelling in tents, as it were, and morally shiv- 
ering by hearths which, heap the bituminous coal upon 
them as we might, no blaze could render cheerful. I 
remember, to this day, the dreary feeling with which I 
sat by our first English fireside, and watched the chill and 
rainy twilight of an autumn day darkening down upon 
the garden ; while the portrait of the preceding occupant 
of the house (evidently a most unamiable personage in 
his lifetime) scowled inhospitably from above the mantel- 
piece, as if indignant that an American should try to 
make himself at home there. Possibly it may appease 
his sulky shade to know that I quitted his abode as much 
a stranger as I entered it. But now, at last, we were in 
a genuine British home, where refined and warm-hearted 
people had just been living their daily life, and had left 
us a summer's inheritance of slowly ripened days, such 
as a stranger's hasty opportunities so seldom permit him 
to enjoy. 

Within so trifling a distance of the central spot of all 
the world, (which, as Americans have at present no cen- 
tre of their own, we may allow to be somewhere in the 
vicinity, we will say, of St. Paul's Cathedral,) it might 
have seemed natural that I should be tossed about by the 
turbulence of the vast London whirlpool. But I had 
drifted into a still eddy, where conflicting movements 
made a repose, and, wearied with a good deal of uncon- 
genial activity, I found the quiet of my temporary haven 



250 A LONDON SUBURB. 

more attractive than anything that the great town could 
offer. I already knew London well ; that is to say, I 
had long -ago satisfied (so far as it was capable of satis- 
faction) that mysterious yearning — the magnetism of 
millions of hearts operating upon one — which impels 
every man's individuality to mingle itself with the im- 
mensest mass of human life within his scope. Day after 
day, at an earlier period, I had trodden the thronged 
thoroughfares, the broad, lonely squares, the lanes, alleys, 
and strange labyrinthine courts, the parks, the gardens 
and enclosures of ancient studious societies, so retired and 
silent amid the city-uproar, the markets, the foggy streets 
along the riverside, the bridges, — I had sought all parts 
of the metropolis, in short, with an unweariable and in- 
discriminating curiosity ; until few of the native inhab- 
itants, I fancy, had turned so many of its corners as 
myself. These aimless wanderings (in which my prime 
purpose and achievement were to lose my way, and so 
to find it the more surely) had brought me, at one time 
or another, to the sight and actual presence of almost all 
the objects and renowned localities that I had read about, 
and which had made London the dream-city of my youth. 
I had found it better than my dream ; for there is noth- 
ing else in life comparable (in that species of enjoyment, 
I mean) to the thick, heavy, oppressive, sombre delight 
which an American is sensible of, hardly knowing whether 
to call it a pleasure or a pain, in the atmosphere of Lon- 
don. The result was, that I acquired a home-feeling 
there, as nowhere else in the world, — though afterwards 
I came to have a somewhat similar sentiment in regard 
to Rome ; and as long as either of those two great cities 
shall exist, the cities of the Past and of the Present, a 



A LONDON SUBURB. 251 

man's native soil may crumble beneath his feet without 
leaving him altogether homeless upon earth. 

Thus, having once fully yielded to its influence, I was 
in a manner free of the city, and could approach or keep 
away from it as I pleased. Hence it happened, that, liv- 
ing within a quarter of an hour's rush of the London 
Bridge Terminus, I was oftener tempted to spend a 
whole summer-day in our garden than to seek anything 
new or old, wonderful or commonplace, beyond its pre- 
cincts. It was a delightful garden, of no great extent, 
but comprising a good' many facilities for repose and 
enjoyment, such as arbors and garden-seats, shrubbery, 
flower-beds, rose-bushes in a profusion of bloom, pinks, 
poppies, geraniums, sweet-peas, and a variety of other 
scarlet, yellow, blue, and purple blossoms, which I did 
not trouble myself to recognize individually, yet had al- 
ways a vague sense of their beauty about me. The dim 
sky of England has a most happy effect on the coloring 
of flowers, blending richness with delicacy in the same 
texture ; but in this garden, as everywhere else, the ex- 
uberance of English verdure had a greater charm than 
any tropical splendor or diversity of hue. The hunger 
for natural beauty might be satisfied with grass and green 
leaves forever. Conscious of the triumph of England in 
this respect, and loyally anxious for the credit of my own 
country, it gratified me to observe what trouble and pains 
the English gardeners are fain to throw away in pro- 
ducing a few sour plums and abortive pears and apples, — 
as, for example, in this very garden, where a row of un- 
happy trees were spread out perfectly flat against a brick 
wall, looking as if impaled alive, or crucified, with a cruel 
and unattainable purpose of compelling them to produce 



252 A LONDON SUBURB. 

rich fruit by torture. For my part, I never ate an Eng- 
lish fruit, raised in the open air, that could compare in 
flavor with a Yankee turnip. 

The garden included that prime feature of English do- 
mestic scenery, a lawn. It had been levelled, carefully 
shorn, and converted into a bowling-green, on which we 
sometimes essayed to practise the time-honored game of 
bowls, most unskilfully, yet not without a perception that 
it involves a very pleasant mixture of exercise and ease, 
as is the case with most of the old English pastimes. 
Our little domain was shut in by the house on one side, 
and in other directions by a hedge-fence and a brick w r all, 
which last was concealed or softened by shrubbery and 
the impaled fruit-trees already mentioned. Over all the 
outer region, beyond our immediate precincts, there was 
an abundance of foliage, tossed aloft from the near or 
distant trees with which that agreeable suburb is adorned. 
The effect was wonderfully sylvan and rural, insomuch 
that we might have fancied ourselves in the depths of a 
wooded seclusion ; only that, at brief intervals, we could 
hear the galloping sweep of a railway train passing within 
a quarter of a mile, and its discordant screech, moder- 
ated by a little farther distance, as it reached the Black- 
heath Station. That harsh, rough sound, seeking me out 
so inevitably, was the voice of the great world summon- 
ing me forth. I know not whether I was the more pained 
or pleased to be thus constantly put in mind of the neigh- 
borhood of London ; for, on the one hand, my conscience 
stung me a little for reading a book, or playing with chil- 
dren in the grass, when there were so many better things 
for an enlightened traveller to do, — while, at the same 
time, it gave a deeper delight to my luxurious idleness, 



A LONDON SUBURB. 253 

to contrast it with the turmoil which I escaped. On the 
whole, however, I do not repent of a single wasted hour, 
and only wish that I could have spent twice as many in 
the same way ; for the impression on my memory is, that 
I was as happy in that hospitable garden as the English 
summer-day w r as long. 

One chief condition of my enjoyment was the weather. 
Italy has nothing like it, nor America. There never was 
such weather except in England, where, in requital of a 
vast amount of horrible east-wind between February and 
June, and a brown October and black November, and a 
Avet, chill, sunless whiter, there are a few w r eeks of in- 
comparable summer, scattered through July and August, 
and the earlier portion of September, small in quantity, 
but exquisite enough to atone for the whole year's atmos- 
pherical delinquencies. After all, the prevalent sombre- 
ness may have brought out those sunny intervals in such 
high relief, that I see them, in my recollection, brighter 
than they really were : a little light makes a glory for 
people who live habitually in a gray gloom. The Eng- 
lish, however, do not seem to know how enjoyable the 
momentary gleams of their summer are ; they call it 
broiling weather, and hurry to the seaside with red, per- 
spiring faces, in a state of combustion and deliquescence ; 
and I have observed that even their cattle have similar 
susceptibilities, seeking the deepest shade, or standing 
mid-leg deep in pools and streams to cool themselves, at 
temperatures which our own cows would deem little more 
than barely comfortable. To myself, after the summer 
heats of my native land had somewhat effervesced out 
of my blood and memory, it was the weather of Paradise 
itself. It might be a little too warm; but it was that 



254 A LONDON SUBURB. 

modest and inestimable superabundance which constitutes 
a bounty of Providence, instead of just a niggardly 
enough. During my first year in England, residing in 
perhaps the most ungenial part of the kingdom, I could 
never be quite comfortable without a fire on the hearth ; 
in the second twelvemonth, beginning to get acclimatized, 
I became sensible of an austere friendliness, shy, but some- 
times almost tender, in the veiled, shadowy, seldom smil- 
ing summer ; and in the succeeding years — whether 
that I had renewed my fibre with English beef and re- 
plenished my blood with English ale, or whatever were 
the cause — I grew content with winter and especially in 
love with summer, desiring little more for happiness than 
merely to breathe and bask. At the midsummer which 
we are now speaking of, I must needs confess that the 
noontide sun came down more fervently than I found al- 
together tolerable ; so that I was fain to shift my position 
with the shadow of the shrubbery, making myself the 
movable index of a sundial that reckoned up the hours 
of an almost interminable day. 

For each day seemed endless, though never wearisome. 
As far as your actual experience is concerned, the English 
summer-day has positively no beginning and no end. 
When you awake, at any reasonable hour, the sun is 
already shining through the curtains ; you live through 
unnumbered hours of Sabbath quietude, with a calm 
variety of incident softly etched upon their tranquil 
lapse ; and at length you become conscious that it is 
bedtime again, while there is still enough daylight in 
the sky to make the pages of your book distinctly legible. 
Night, if there be any such season, hangs down a trans- 
parent veil through which the by-gone day beholds its 



A LONDON SUBURB. 255 

successor ; or, if not quite true of the latitude of London, 
it may be soberly affirmed of the more northern parts of 
the island, that To-morrow is born before its Yesterday is 
dead. They exist together in the golden twilight, where 
the decrepit old day dimly discerns the face of the omi- 
nous infant ; and you, though a mere mortal, may simul- 
taneously touch them both, with one finger of recollection 
and another of prophecy. I cared not how long the day 
might be, nor how many of them. I had earned this 
repose by a long course of irksome toil and perturba- 
tion, and could have been content never to stray out of 
the limits of that suburban villa and its garden. If I 
lacked anything beyond, it would have satisfied me well 
enough to dream about it, instead of struggling for its 
actual possession. At least, this was the feeling of the 
moment ; although the transitory, flitting, and irrespon- 
sible character of my life there was perhaps the most 
enjoyable element of all, as allowing me much of the 
comfort of house and home without any sense of their 
weight upon my back. The nomadic life has great ad- 
vantages, if Ave can find tents ready pitched for us at 
every stage. 

So much for the interior of our abode, — a spot of 
deepest quiet, within reach of the intensest activity. 
But, even when we stepped beyond our own gate, we 
were not shocked with any immediate presence of the 
great world. We were dwelling in one of those oases 
that have grown up (in comparatively recent years, I be- 
lieve) on the wide waste of Blackheath, which otherwise 
offers a vast extent of unoccupied ground in singular 
proximity to the metropolis. As a general thing, the 
proprietorship of the soil seems to exist in everybody 



256 A LONDON SUBURB. 

and nobody ; but exclusive rights have been obtained, 
here and there, chiefly by men whose daily concerns link 
them with London, so that you find their villas or boxes 
standing along village streets which have often more of 
an American aspect than the elder English settlements. 
The scene is semi-rural. Ornamental trees overshadow 
the sidewalks, and grassy margins border the wheel- 
tracks. The houses, to be sure, have certain points of 
difference from those of an American village, bearing 
tokens of architectural design, though seldom of indi- 
vidual taste ; and, as far as possible, they stand aloof 
from the street, and separated each from its neighbor by 
hedge or fence, in accordance with the careful exclusive- 
ness of the English character, which impels the occupant, 
moreover, to cover the front of his dwelling with as 
much concealment of shrubbery as his limits will allow. 
Through the interstices* you catch glimpses of well-kept 
lawns, generally ornamented with flowers, and with what 
the English call rock- work, being heaps of ivy-grown 
stones and fossils, designed for romantic effect in a small 
way. Two or three of such village streets as are here 
described -take a collective name, — as, for instance, Black- 
heath Park, — and constitute a kind of community of 
residents, with gateways, kept by a policeman, and a 
semi-privacy, stepping beyond which, you find yourself 
on the breezy heath. 

On this great, bare, dreary common I often went astray, 
as I afterwards did on the Campagna of Rome, and drew 
the air (tainted with London smoke though it might be) 
into my lungs by deep inspirations, with a strange and 
unexpected sense of desert freedom. The misty atmos- 
phere helps you to fancy a remoteness that perhaps does 



A LONDON SUBURB. 257 

not quite exist. During the little time that it lasts, the 
solitude is as impressive as that of a Western prairie or 
forest ; but soon the railway shriek, a mile or two away, 
insists upon informing you of your whereabout ; or you 
recognize in the distance some landmark that you may 
have known, — an insulated villa, perhaps, with its gar- 
den wall around it, or the rudimental street of a new 
settlement which is sprouting on this otherwise barren 
soil. Half a century ago, the most frequent token of 
man's beneficent contiguity might have been a gibbet, and 
the creak, like a tavern sign, of a murderer swinging to 
and fro in irons. Blackheath, with its highwaymen and 
footpads, was dangerous in those days ; and even now, 
for aught I know, the Western prairie may still compare 
favorably with it as a safe region to go astray in. When 
I was acquainted with Blackheath, the ingenious device 
of garroting had recently come into fashion ; and I can 
remember, while crossing those waste places at midnight, 
and hearing footsteps behind me, to have been sensibly 
encouraged by also hearing, not far off, the clinking hoof- 
tramp of one of the horse-patrols who do regular duty 
there. About sunset, or a little later, was the time when 
the broad and somewhat desolate peculiarity of the 
heath seemed to me to put on its utmost impressiveness. 
At that hour, finding myself on elevated ground, I once 
had a view of immense London, four or five miles off, 
with the vast Dome in the midst, and the towers of the 
two Houses of Parliament rising up into the smoky 
canopy, the thinner substance of which obscured a mass 
of things, and hovered about the objects that were most 
distinctly visible, — a glorious and sombre picture, dusky, 
awful, but irresistibly attractive, like a young man's dream 
17 



258 A LONDON SUBURB. 

of the great world, foretelling at that distance a grandeur 
never to be fully realized. 

While I lived in that neighborhood, the tents of two or 
three sets of cricket-players were constantly pitched on 
Blackheath, and matches were going forward that seemed 
to involve the honor and credit of communities or coun- 
ties, exciting an interest in everybody but myself, who 
cared not what part of England might glorify itself at 
the expense of another. It is necessary to be born an 
Englishman, I believe, in order to enjoy this great na- 
tional game ; at any rate, as a spectacle for an outside 
observer, I found it lazy, lingering, tedious, and utterly 
devoid of pictorial effects. Choice of other amusements 
was at hand. Butts for archery were established, and 
bows and arrows were to be let, at so many shots for a 
penny, — there being abundance of space for a farther 
flight-shot than any modern archer can lend to his shaft. 
Then there was an absurd game of throwing a stick at 
crockery ware, which I have witnessed a hundred times, 
and personally engaged in once or twice, without ever 
having the satisfaction to see a bit of broken crockery. 
In other spots you found donkeys for children to ride, and 
ponies of a very meek and patient spirit, on which the 
Cockney pleasure seekers of both sexes rode races and 
made wonderful displays of horsemanship. By way 
of refreshment there was gingerbread, (but, as a true 
patriot, I must pronounce it greatly inferior to our native 
dainty,) and ginger-beer, and probably stancher liquor 
among the booth-keeper's hidden stores. The frequent 
railway trains, as well as the numerous steamers to Green- 
wich, have made the vacant portions of Blackheath a play- 
ground and breathing-place for the Londoners, readily and 



A LONDON SUBURB. 259 

very cheaply accessible ; so that, in view of this broader 
use and enjoyment, I a little grudged the tracts that have 
been filched away, so to speak, and individualized by 
thriving citizens. One sort of visitors especially interested 
me : they were schools of little boys or girls, under the 
guardianship of their instructors, — charity schools, as I 
often surmised from their aspect, collected among dark 
alleys and squalid courts ; and hither they were brought 
to spend a summer afternoon, these pale little progeny of 
the sunless nooks of London, who had never known that 
the sky was any broader than that narrow and vapory 
strip above their native lane. I fancied that they took 
but a doubtful pleasure, being half affrighte'd at the wide, 
empty space overhead and round about them, finding the 
air too little medicated with smoke, soot, and graveyard 
exhalations, to be breathed with comfort, and feeling shel- 
terless and lost because grimy London, their slatternly 
and disreputable mother, had suffered them to stray out 
of her arms. 

Passing among these holiday people, we come to one 
of the gateways of Greenwich Park, opening through 
an old brick wall. It admits us from the bare heath 
into a scene of antique cultivation and woodland orna- 
ment, traversed in all directions by avenues of trees, 
many of which bear tokens of a venerable age. These 
broad and well-kept pathways rise and decline over the 
elevations and along the bases of gentle hills which 
diversify the whole surface of the Park. The loftiest 
and most abrupt of them (though but of very moderate 
height) is one of the earth's noted summits, and may hold 
up its head with Mont Blanc and Chimborazo, as being 
the site of Greenwich Observatory, where, if all nations 



260 A LONDON SUBURB. 

will consent to say so, the longitude of our great globe 
begins. I used to regulate my watch by the broad dial- 
plate against the Observatory wall, and felt it pleasant to 
be standing at the very centre of Time and Space. 

There are lovelier parks than this in the neighborhood 
of London, richer scenes of greensward and cultivated 
trees ; and Kensington, especially, in a summer after- 
noon, has seemed to me as delightful as any place can or 
ought to be, in a world which, some time or other, we 
must quit. But Greenwich, too, is beautiful, — a spot 
where the art of man has conspired with Nature, as if he 
and the great mother had taken counsel together how to 
make a pleasant scene, and the longest liver of the two 
had faithfully carried out their mutual design. It has, 
likewise, an additional charm of its own, because, to all 
appearance, it is the people's property and play -ground 
in a much more genuine way than the aristocratic resorts 
in closer vicinity to the metropolis. It affords one of the 
instances in which the monarch's property is actually the 
people's, and shows how much more natural is their 
relation to the sovereign than to the nobility, which pre- 
tends to hold the intervening space between the two : for 
a nobleman makes a paradise only for himself, and fills it 
with his own pomp and pride ; whereas the people are 
sooner or later the legitimate inheritors of whatever 
beauty kings and queens create, as now of Greenwich 
Park. On Sundays, when the sun shone, and even on 
those grim and sombre days when, if it do not actually 
rain, the English persist in calling it fine weather, it was 
too good to see how sturdily the plebeians trod under their 
own oaks, and what fulness of simple enjoyment they 
evidently found there. They were the people, — not the 



A LONDON SUBURB. 261 

populace, — specimens of a class whose Sunday clothes 
are a distinct kind of garb from their week-day ones ; 
and this, in England, implies wholesome habits of life, 
daily thrift, and a rank above the lowest. I longed to be 
acquainted with them, in order to investigate what man- 
ner of folks they were, what sort of households they kept, 
their politics, their religion, their tastes, and whether they 
were as narrow-minded as their betters. There can be 
very little doubt of it : an Englishman is English, in 
whatever rank of life, though no more intensely so, I 
should imagine, as an artisan or petty shopkeeper, than 
as a member of Parliament. 

The English character, as I conceive it, is by no means 
a very lofty one ; they seem to have a great deal of earth 
and grimy, dust clinging about them, as was probably 
the case with the stalwart and quarrelsome people who 
sprouted up out of the soil, after Cadmus had sown the 
dragon's teeth. And yet, though the individual English- 
man is sometimes preternaturally disagreeable, an ob- 
server standing aloof has a sense of natural kindness 
towards them in the lump. They adhere closer to the 
original simplicity in which mankind was created than 
we ourselves do ; they love, quarrel, laugh, cry, and turn 
their actual selves inside out, with greater freedom than 
any class of Americans would consider decorous. It was 
often so with these holiday folks in Greenwich Park ; 
and, ridiculous as it may sound, I fancy myself to have 
caught very satisfactory glimpses of Arcadian life among 
the Cockneys there, hardly beyond the scope of Bow- 
Bells, picnicking in the grass, uncouthly gambolling on 
the broad slopes, or straying in motley groups or by sin- 
gle pairs of lovemaking youths and maidens, along the 



262 A LONDON SUBURB. 

sun-streaked avenues. Even the omnipresent policemen 
or park-keepers could not disturb the beatific impression 
on my mind. One feature, at all events, of the Golden 
Age was to be seen in the herds of deer that encountered 
you in the somewhat remoter recesses of the Park, and 
were readily prevailed upon to nibble a bit of bread out 
of your hand. But, though no wrong had ever been 
done them, and no horn had sounded nor hound bayed at 
the heels of themselves or their antlered progenitors, for 
centuries past, there was still an apprehensiveness linger- 
ing in their hearts ; so that a slight movement of the 
hand or a step too near would send a, whole squadron 
of them scampering away, just as a breath scatters the 
winged seeds of a dandelion. 

The aspect of Greenwich Park, with all those fes- 
tal people wandering through it, resembled that of the 
Borghese Gardens under the walls of JRome, on a Sunday 
or Saint's day ; but, I am not ashamed to say, it a little 
disturbed whatever grimly ghost of Puritanic strictness 
might be lingering in the sombre depths of a New Eng- 
land heart, among severe and sunless remembrances of 
the Sabbaths of childhood, and pangs of remorse for ill- 
gotten lessons in the catechism, and for erratic fantasies 
or hardly suppressed laughter in the middle of long ser- 
mons. Occasionally, I tried to take the long-hoarded 
sting out of these compunctious smarts by attending 
divine service in the open air. On a cart outside of the 
Park-wall (and, if I mistake not, at two or three corners 
and secluded spots within the Park itself) a Methodist 
preacher uplifts his voice and speedily gathers a congre- 
gation, bis zeal for whose religious welfare impels the 
good man to such earnest vociferation and toilsome ges- 



A LONDON SUBURB. 263 

ture that his perspiring face is quickly in a stew. His 
inward flame conspires with the too fervid sun and makes 
a positive martyr of him, even in the very exercise of his 
pious labor ; insomuch that he purchases every atom of 
spiritual increment to his hearers by loss of his own cor- 
poreal solidity, and, should his discourse last long enough, 
must finally exhale before their eyes. If I smile at him, 
be it understood, it is not in scorn ; he performs his sacred 
office more acceptably than many a prelate. These way- 
side services attract numbers who would not otherwise 
listen to prayer, sermon, or hymn, from one year's end to 
another, and who, for that very reason, are the auditors 
most likely to be moved by the preacher's eloquence. 
Yonder Greenwich pensioner, too, — in his costume of 
three-cornered hat, and old-fashioned, brass-buttoned blue 
coat with ample skirts, which makes him look like a con- 
temporary of Admiral Benbow, — that tough old mariner 
may hear a word or two which will go nearer his heart 
than anything that the chaplain of the Hospital can be 
expected to deliver. I always noticed, moreover, that a 
considerable proportion of the audience were soldiers, 
who came hither with a day's leave from Woolwich, — 
hardy veterans in aspect, some of whom wore as many 
as four or five medals, Crimean or East-Indian, on the 
breasts of their scarlet coats. The miscellaneous congre- 
gation listen with every appearance of heartfelt interest ; 
and, for my own part, I must frankly acknowledge that I 
never found it possible to give five minutes' attention to 
any other English preaching : so cold and commonplace 
are the homilies that pass for such, under the aged roofs 
of churches. And as for cathedrals, the sermon is an 
exceedingly diminutive and unimportant part of the relig- 



264 A LONDON SUBURB. 

ious services, — if, indeed, it be considered a part, — 
among the pompous ceremonies, the intonations, and the 
resounding and lofty-voiced strains of the choristers. The 
magnificence of the setting quite dazzles out what we 
Puritans look upon as the jewel of the whole affair ; for 
I presume that it was our forefathers, the Dissenters in 
England and America, who gave the sermon its present 
prominence in the Sabbath exercises. 

The Methodists are probably the first and only English- 
men who have worshipped in the open air since the an- 
cient Britons listened to the preaching of the Druids ; 
and it reminded me of that old priesthood, to see certain 
memorials of their dusky epoch — not religious, however, 
but warlike — in the neighborhood of the spot where the 
Methodist was holding forth. These were some ancient 
barrows, beneath or within which are supposed to lie 
buried the slain of a forgotten or doubtfully remembered 
battle, fought on the site of Greenwich Park as long ago 
as two or three centuries after the birth of Christ. What- 
ever may once have been their height and magnitude, 
they have now scarcely more prominence in the actual 
scene than the battle of which they are the sole monu- 
ments retains in history, — being only a few mounds side 
by side, elevated a little above the surface of the ground, 
ten or twelve feet in diameter, with a shallow depression 
in their summits. When one of them was opened, not 
long since, no bones, nor armor, nor weapons were dis- 
covered, nothing but some small jewels, and a tuft of hair, 
— perhaps from the head of a valiant general, who, dying 
on the field of his victory, bequeathed this lock, together 
with his indestructible fame, to after ages. The hair and 
jewels are probably in the British Museum, where the 



A LONDON SUBURB. 265 

potsherds and rubbish of innumerable generations make 
the visitor wish that each passing century could carry off 
all its fragments and relics along with it, instead of add- 
ing them to the continually accumulating burden which 
human knowledge is compelled to lug upon its back. As 
for the fame, I know not what has become of it. 

After traversing the Park, we come into the neighbor- 
hood of Greenwich Hospital, and will pass through one 
of its spacious gateways for the sake of glancing at an 
establishment which does more honor to the heart of Ens- 
land than anything else that I am acquainted with, of a 
public nature. It is very seldom that we can be sensible 
of anything like kindliness in the acts or relations of such 
an artificial thing as a National Government. Our own 
Government, I should conceive, is too much an abstraction 
ever to feel any sympathy for its maimed sailors and sol- 
diers, though it will doubtless do them a severe kind of 
justice, as chilling as the touch of steel. But it seemed 
to me that the Greenwich pensioners are the petted chil- 
dren of the nation, and that the Government is their dry- 
nurse, and that the old men themselves have a childlike 
consciousness of their position. Very likely, a better sort 
of life might have been arranged, and a wiser care be- 
stowed on them ; but, such as it is, it enables them to 
spend a sluggish, careless, comfortable old age, grumbling, 
growling, gruff, as if all the foul weather of their past 
years were pent up within them, yet not much more dis- 
contented than such weather-beaten and battle-battered 
fragments of human kind must inevitably be. Their 
home, in its outward form, is on a very magnificent plan. 
Its germ was a royal palace, the full expansion of which 
has resulted in a series of edifices externally more beauti- 



266 A LONDON SUBURB. 

ful than any English palace that I 
of several quadrangles of stately architecture, united by 
colonnades and gravel Avalks, and enclosing grassy squares, 
with statues in the centre, the whole extending along the 
Thames. It is built of marble, or very light-colored 
stone, in the classic style, with pillars and porticos, which 
(to my own taste, and, I fancy, to that of the old sailors) 
produce but a cold and shivery effect in the English cli- 
mate. Had I been the architect, I would have studied 
the characters, habits, and predilections of nautical people 
in Wapping, Rotherhithe, and the neighborhood of the 
Tower, (places which I visited in affectionate remem- 
brance of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, and other actual or 
mythological navigators,) and would have built the hospi- 
tal in a kind of ethereal similitude to the narrow, dark, 
ugly, and inconvenient, but snug and cozy homeliness of 
the sailor boarding-houses there. There can be no ques- 
tion that all the above attributes, or enough of them to 
satisfy an old sailor's heart, might be reconciled with 
architectural beauty and the wholesome contrivances of 
modern dwellings, and thus a novel and genuine style of 
building be given to the world. 

But their countrymen meant kindly by the old fellows in 
assigning them the ancient royal site where Elizabeth held 
her court and Charles II. began to build his palace. So far 
as the locality went, it was treating them like so many 
kings ; and, with a discreet abundance of grog, beer, and 
tobacco, there was perhaps little more to be accomplished 
in behalf of men whose whole previous lives have tended 
to unfit them for old age. Their chief discomfort is prob- 
ably for lack of something to do or think about. But, 
judging by the few whom I saw, a listless habit seems to 



A LONDON SUBURB. 267 

have crept over them, a dim dreaminess of mood, in which 
they sit between asleep and awake, and find the long day 
wearing towards bedtime without its having made any 
distinct record of itself upon their consciousness. Sitting 
on stone benches in the sunshine, they subside into slum- 
ber, or nearly so, and start at the approach of footsteps 
echoing under the colonnades, ashamed to be caught nap- 
ping, and rousing themselves in a hurry, as formerly on 
the midnight watch at sea. In their brightest mo- 
ments, they gather in groups and bore one another with 
endless sea-yarns about their voyages under famous ad- 
mirals, and about gale and calm, battle and chase, and 
all that class of incident that has its sphere on the deck 
and in the hollow interior of a ship, where their world 
has exclusively been. For other pastime, they quarrel 
among themselves, comrade with comrade, and perhaps 
shake paralytic fists in furrowed faces. If inclined for a 
little exercise, they can bestir their wooden legs on the 
long esplanade that borders by the Thames, criticizing 
the rig of passing ships, and firing off volleys of male- 
diction at the steamers, which have made the sea another 
element than that they used to be acquainted with. All 
this is but cold comfort for the evening of life, yet may 
compare rather favorably with the preceding portions of 
it, comprising little save imprisonment on shipboard, in 
the course of which they have been tossed all about the 
world and caught hardly a glimpse of it, forgetting what 
grass and trees arc. and never finding out what woman 
is, though they may have encountered a painted spectre 
which they took for her. A country owes much to human 
beings whose bodies she has worn out and whose immor- 
tal part she has left undeveloped or debased, as we find 



268 A LONDON SUBURB. 

them here ; and having wasted an idle paragraph upon 
them, let me now suggest that old men have a kind of 
susceptibility to moral impressions, and even (up to an 
advanced period) a receptivity of truth, which often ap- 
pears to come to them after the active time of life is past. 
The Greenwich pensioners might prove better subjects 
for true education now than in their school-boy days ; but 
then where is the Normal School that could educate in- 
structors for such a class ? 

There is a beautiful chapel for the pensioners, in the 
classic style, over the altar of which hangs a picture by 
West. I never could look at it long enough to make out 
its design ; for this artist (though it pains me to say it of 
so respectable a countryman) had a gift of frigidity, a 
knack of grinding ice into his paint, a power of stupefying 
the spectator's perceptions and quelling his sympathy, 
beyond any other limner that ever handled a brush. In 
spite of many pangs of conscience, I seize this opportu- 
nity to wreak a lifelong abhorrence upon the poor, blame- 
less man, for the sake of that dreary picture of Lear, an 
explosion of frosty fury, that used to be a bugbear to me in 
the Athenaeum Exhibition. Would fire burn it, I wonder ? 

The principal thing that they have to show you, at 
Greenwich Hospital, is the Painted Hall. It is a splendid 
and spacious room, at least a hundred feet long and half 
as high, with a ceiling painted in fresco by Sir James 
Thornhill. As a work of art, I presume, this frescoed 
canopy has little merit, though it produces an exceedingly 
rich effect by its brilliant coloring and as a specimen of 
magnificent upholstery. The walls of the grand apart- 
ment are entirely covered with pictures, many of them 
representing battles and other naval incidents that were 



A LONDON SUBURB. 269 

once fresher in the world's memory than now, but chiefly 
portraits of old admirals, comprising the whole line of 
heroes who have trod the quarter-decks of British ships 
for more than two hundred years back. Next to a tomb 
in Westminster Abbey, which was Nelson's most elevated 

I object of ambition, it would seem to be the highest meed 
of a naval warrior to have his portrait hung up in the 
Painted -Hall; but, by dint of victory upon victory, these 
illustrious personages have grown to be a mob, and by no 
means a very interesting one, so far as regards the char- 
acter of the faces here depicted. They are generally 
commonplace, and often singularly stolid ; and I have 
observed (both in the Painted Hall and elsewhere, and 
not only in portraits, but in the actual presence of such 
renowned people as I have caught glimpses of) that the 
countenances of heroes are not nearly so impressive as 
those of statesmen, — except, of course, in the rare in- 
stances where warlike, ability has been but the one-sided 
manifestation of a profound genius for managing the 
world's affairs. Nine tenths of these distinguished admi- 
rals, for instance, if their faces tell truth, must needs 
have been blockheads, and might have served better, one 
would imagine, as wooden figure-heads for their own ships 
than to direct any difficult and intricate scheme of action 
from the quarter-deck. It is doubtful whether the same 
kind of men will hereafter meet with a similar degree of 
success ; for they w r ere victorious chiefly through the old 
English hardihood, exercised in a field of which modern 

| science had not yet got possession. Rough valor has lost 
something of its value, since their days, and must continue 
to sink lower and lower in the comparative estimate of 
warlike qualities. In the next naval war, as between 



270 A LONDON SUBURB. 

England and France, I would bet, methinks, upon the 
Frenchman's head. 

It is remarkable, however, that the great naval hero of 
England — the greatest, therefore, in the world, and of 
all time — had none of the stolid characteristics that be- 
long to his class, and cannot fairly be accepted as their 
representative man. Foremost in the roughest of pro- 
fessions, he was as delicately organized as a woman, and 
as painfully sensitive as a poet. More than any other 
Englishman he won the love and admiration of his coun- 
try, but won them through the efficacy of qualities that 
are not English, or, at all events, were intensified in his 
case and made poignant and powerful by something mor- 
bid in the man, which put him otherwise at cross-pur- 
poses with life. He was a man of genius ; and genius in 
an Englishman (not to cite the good old simile of a pearl 
in the oyster) is usually a symptom of a lack of balance 
in the general making-up of the character ; as we may 
satisfy ourselves by running over the list of their poets, 
for example, and observing how many of them have been 
sickly or deformed, and how often their lives have been 
darkened by insanity. An ordinary Englishman is the 
healthiest and wholesomest of human beings ; an extraor- 
dinary one is almost always, in one way or another, a sick 
man. It was so with Lord Nelson. The wonderful con- 
trast or relation between his personal qualities, the posi- 
tion which he held, and the life that he lived, makes him 
as interesting a personage as all history has to show ; 
and it is a pity that Southey's biography — so good in its 
superficial way, and yet so inadequate as regards any real 
delineation of the man — should have taken the subject 
out of the hands of some writer endowed with more deli- 



A LONDON SUBURB. 271 

cate appreciation and deeper insight than that genuine 
Englishman possessed. But Southey accomplished his 
own, purpose, which, apparently, was to present his hero 
as a pattern for England's young midshipmen. 

But the English capacity for hero-worship is full to 
the brim with what they are able to comprehend of Lord 
Nelson's character. Adjoining the Painted Hall is a 
smaller room, the walls of which are completely and ex- 
clusively adorned with pictures of the great Admiral's 
exploits. We see the frail, ardent man in all the mo: 
noted events of his career, from his encounter with a 
Polar bear to his death at Trafalgar, quivering here and 
there about the room like a blue, lambent flame. No 
Briton ever enters that apartment without feeling the 
beef and ale of his composition stirred to its depths, and 
finding himself changed into a hero for the nonce, how- 
ever stolid his brain, however tough his heart, however 
unexcitable his ordinary mood. To confess the truth, I 
myself, though belonging to another parish, have been 
deeply sensible to the sublime recollections there aroused, 
acknowledging that Nelson expressed his life in a kind 
of symbolic poetry which I had as much right to under- 
stand as these burly islanders. Cool and critical observer 
as I sought to be, I enjoyed their burst of honest indigna- 
tion when a visitor (not an American, I am glad to say) 
thrust his walking-stick almost into Nelson's face, in one 
of the pictures, by way of pointing a remark ; and the 
bystanders immediately glowed like so many hot coals, 
and would probably have consumed the offender in their 
wrath, had he not effected his retreat. But the most sa- 
cred objects of all are two of Nelson's coats, under sepa- 
rate glass cases. One is that which he wore at the Battle 



272 A LONDON SUBURB. 

of the Nile, and it is now sadly injured by moths, which 
will quite destroy it in a few years, unless its guardians 
preserve it as we do Washington's military suit, by occa- 
sionally baking it in an oven. The other is the coat in 
which he received his death-wound at Trafalgar. On its 
breast are sewed three or four stars and orders of knight- 
hood, now much dimmed by time and damp, but which 
glittered brightly enough on the battle-day to draw the 
fatal aim of a French marksman. The bullet-hole is 
visible on the shoulder, as well as a part of the golden 
tassels of an epaulet, the rest of which was shot away. 
Over the coat is laid a white waistcoat with a great blood- 
stain on it, out of which all the redness has utterly faded, 
leaving it of a dingy yellow hue, in the threescore years 
since that blood gushed out. Yet it was once the reddest 
blood in England, — Nelson's blood ! 

The hospital stands close adjacent to the town of Green- 
wich, which will always retain a kind of festal aspect in 
my memory, in consequence of my having first become 
acquainted with it on Easter Monday. Till a few years 
ago, the first three days of Easter were a carnival season 
in this old town, during which the idle and disreputable 
part of London poured itself into the streets like an 
inundation of the Thames, — as unclean as that turbid 
mixture of the offscourings of the vast city, and over- 
flowing with its grimy pollution whatever rural innocence, 
if any, might be found in the suburban neighborhood. 
This festivity was called Greenwich Fair, the final one 
of which, in an immemorial succession, it was my fortune 
to behold. 

If I had bethought myself of going through the fair 
with a note-book and pencil, jotting down all the promi- 



A LONDON SUBURB. 273 

nent objects, I doubt not that the result might have been 
a sketch of English life quite as characteristic and worthy 
of historical preservation as an account of the Roman 
Carnival. Having neglected to do so, I remember little 
more than a confusion of unwashed and shabbily dressed 
people, intermixed with some smarter figures, but, on the 
whole, presenting a mobbish appearance such as we never 
see in our own country. It taught me to understand why 
Shakspeare, in speaking of a crowd, so often alludes to 
its attribute of evil odor. The common people of Eng- 
land, I am afraid, have no daily familiarity with even so 
necessary a thing as a wash-bowl, not to mention a bath- 
ing-tub. And furthermore, it is one mighty difference 
between them and us, that every man and woman on our 
side of the water has a working-day suit and a holiday 
suit, and is occasionally as fresh as a rose, whereas, in 
the good old country, the griminess of his labor or squalid 
habits clings forever to the individual, and gets to be a 
part of his personal substance. These are broad facts, 
involving great corollaries and dependencies. There are 
really, if you stop to think about it, few sadder spectacles 
in the world than a ragged coat, or a soiled and shabby 
gown, at a festival. 

This unfragrant crowd was exceedingly dense, being 
welded together, as it were, in the street through which 
we strove to make our way. On either side were oys- 
ter-stands, stalls of oranges, (a very prevalent fruit in 
England, where they give the withered ones a guise of 
freshness by boiling them,) and booths covered with old 
sail-cloth, in which the commodity that most attracted the 
eye was gilt gingerbread. It was so completely envel- 
oped in Dutch gilding that I did not at first recognize an 
18 



274 A LONDON SUBURB. 

old acquaintance, but wondered what those golden crowns 
and images could be. There were likewise drums and 
other toys for small children, and a variety of showy and 
worthless articles for children of a larger growth ; though 
it perplexed me to imagine who, in such a mob, could 
have the innocent taste to desire playthings, or the money 
to pay for them. Not that I have a right to accuse the 
mob, on my own knowledge, of being any less innocent 
than a set of cleaner and better dressed people might 
have been ; for, though one of them stole my pocket- 
handkerchief, I could not but consider it fair game, under 
the circumstances, and was grateful to the thief for spar- 
ing me my purse. They were quiet, civil, and remark- 
ably good-humored, making due allowance for the national 
gruffness ; there was no riot, no tumultuous swaying to 
and fro of the mass, such as I have often noted in an 
American crowd, no noise of voices, except frequent 
bursts of laughter, hoarse or shrill, and a widely diffused, 
inarticulate murmur, resembling nothing so much as the 
rumbling of the tide among the arches of London Bridge. 
What immensely perplexed me was a sharp, angry sort 
of rattle, in all quarters, far off and close at hand, and 
sometimes right at my own back, where it sounded as if 
the stout fabric of my English surtout had been ruth- 
lessly rent in twain ; and everybody's clothes, all over 
the fair, were evidently being torn asunder in the same 
way. By and by, I discovered that this strange noise 
was produced by a little instrument called " The Fun of 
the Fair," — a sort of rattle, consisting of a wooden 
wheel, the cogs of which turn against a thin slip of wood, 
and so produce a rasping sound when drawn smartly 
against a person's back. The ladies draw their rattles 



A LONDON SUBURB. 275 

against the backs of their male friends, (and everybody 
passes for a friend at Greenwich Fair,) and the young 
men return the compliment on the broad British backs 
of the ladies ; and all are bound by immemorial custom 
to take it in good part and be merry at the joke. As it 
was one of my prescribed official duties to give an ac- 
count of such mechanical contrivances as might be un- 
known in my own country, I have thought it right to be 
thus particular in describing the Fun of the Fair. 

But this was far from being the sole amusement. 
There were theatrical booths, in front of which were 
pictorial representations of the scenes to be enacted 
within ; and anon a drummer emerged from one of them, 
thumping on a terribly lax drum, and followed by the 
entire dramatis personce, who ranged themselves on a 
wooden platform in front of the theatre. They were 
dressed in character, but wofully shabby, with very clingy 
and wrinkled white tights, threadbare cotton-velvets, 
crumpled silks, and crushed muslin, and all the gloss and 
glory gone out of their aspect and attire, seen thus in 
the broad daylight and after a long series of perform- 
ances. They sang a song together, and withdrew into 
the theatre, whither the public were invited to follow 
them at the inconsiderable cost of a penny a ticket. Be- 
fore another booth stood a pair of brawny fighting-men, 
displaying their muscle, and soliciting patronage for an 
exhibition of the noble British art of pugilism. There 
were pictures of giants, monsters, and outlandish beasts, 
most prodigious, to be sure, and worthy of all admiration, 
unless the artist had gone incomparably beyond his sub- 
ject. Jugglers proclaimed aloud the miracles which they 
were prepared to work ; and posture-makers dislocated 



276 A LONDON SUBURB. 

every joint of their bodies and tied their limbs into inex- 
tricable knots, wherever they could find space to spread 
a little square of carpet on the ground. In the midst 
of the confusion, while everybody was treading on his 
neighbor's toes, some little boys were very solicitous to 
brush your boots. These lads, I believe, are a product 
of modern society, — at least, no older than the time of 
Gay, who celebrates their origin in his " Trivia " ; but in 
most other respects the scene reminded me of Bunyan's 
description of Vanity Fair, — nor is it at all improbable 
that the Pilgrim may have been a merry-maker here, in 
his wild youth. 

It seemed very singular — though, of course, I imme- 
diately classified it as an English characteristic — to see 
a great many portable weighing-machines, the owners of 
which cried out continually and amain, — " Come, know 
your weight ! Come, come, know v your weight to-day ! 
Come, know your weight ! " — and a multitude of people, 
mostly large in the girth, were moved by this vocifera- 
tion to sit down in the machines. I know not whether 
they valued themselves on their beef, and estimated their 
standing as members of society at so much a pound ; but 
I shall set it down as a national peculiarity, and a symbol 
of the prevalence of the earthly over the spiritual ele- 
ment, that Englishmen are wonderfully bent on knowing 
how solid and physically ponderous they are. 

On the whole, having an appetite for the brown bread 
and the tripe and sausages of life, as well as for its nicer 
cates and dainties, I enjoyed the scene, and was amused 
at the sight of a gruff old Greenwich pensioner, who, for- 
getful of the sailor-frolics of his young days, stood look- 
ing with grim disapproval at all these vanities. Thus 



A LONDON SUBURB. 277 

we squeezed our way through the mob-jammed town, 
and emerged into the Park, where, likewise, we met a 
great many merry-makers, but with freer space^ for their 
gambols than in the streets. We soon found ourselves 
the targets for a cannonade with oranges, (most of them 
in a decayed condition,) which went humming past our 
ears from the vantage-ground of neighboring hillocks, 
sometimes hitting our sacred persons with an inelastic 
thump. This was one of the privileged freedoms of the 
time, and was nowise to be resented, except by returning 
the salute. Many persons were running races, hand in 
hand, down the declivities, especially that steepest one 
on the summit of which stands the world-central Obser- 
vatory, and (as in the race of life) the partners were 
usually male and female, and often caught a tumble to- 
gether before reaching the bottom of the hill. Here- 
abouts we were pestered and haunted by two young girls, 
the eldest not more than thirteen, teasing us to buy 
matches ; and finding no market for their commodity, the 
taller one suddenly turned a somerset before our faces, 
and rolled heels over head from top to bottom of the hill 
on which we stood. Then, scrambling up the acclivity, 
the topsy-turvy trollop offered us her matches again, as 
demurely as if she had never flung aside her equilibrium ; 
so that, dreading a repetition of the feat, we gave her 
sixpence and an admonition, and enjoined her never to 
do so any more. 

The most curious amusement that we witnessed here — 
or anywhere else, indeed — was an ancient and hereditary 
pastime called ? Kissing in the Ring." I shall describe 
the sport exactly as I saw it, although an English friend 
assures me that there are certain ceremonies with a hand- 



278 A LONDON SUBURB. 

kerchief, which make it much more decorous and grace- 
ful. A handkerchief, indeed ! There was no such thing 
in the crowd, except it were the one which they had just 
filched out of my pocket. It is one of the simplest kinds 
of games, needing little or no practice to make the player 
altogether perfect ; and the manner of it is this. A ring 
is formed, (in the present case, it was of large circum- 
ference and thickly gemmed around with faces, mostly on 
the broad grin,) into the centre of which steps an ad- 
venturous youth, and, looking round the circle, selects 
whatever maiden may most delight his eye. He pre- 
sents his hand, (which she is bound to accept,) leads her 
into the centre, salutes her on the lips, and retires, taking 
his stand in the expectant circle. The girl, in her turn, 
throws a favoi-able regard on some fortunate young man, 
offers her hand to lead him forth, makes him happy with 
a maidenly kiss, and withdraws to hide her blushes, if 
any there be, among the simpering faces in the ring ; 
while the favored swain loses no time in transferring her 
salute to the prettiest and plumpest among the many 
mouths that are primming themselves in anticipation. 
And thus the thing goes on, till all the festive throng are 
inwreathed and intertwined into an endless and inex- 
tricable chain of kisses ; though, indeed, it smote me with 
compassion to reflect that some forlorn pair of lips might 
be left out, and never know the triumph of a salute, after 
throwing aside so many delicate reserves for the sake of 
winning it. If the young men had any chivalry, there 
was a fair chance to display it by kissing the homeliest 
damsel in the circle. 

To be frank, however, at the first glance, and to my 
American eye, they looked all homely alike, and the 



A LONDON SUBURB. 279 

chivalry that I suggest is more than I could have been 
capable of, at any period of my life. They seemed to 
be country-lasses, of sturdy and wholesome aspect, with 
coarse-grained, cabbage-rosy cheeks, and, I am willing to 
suppose, a stout texture of moral principle, such as would 
bear a good deal of rough usage without suffering much 
detriment. But how unlike the trim little damsels of 
my native land ! I desire above all things to be cour- 
teous ; but, since the plain truth must be told, the soil 
and climate of England produce feminine beauty as rarely 
as they do delicate fruit, and though admirable specimens 
of both are to be met with, they are the hot-house ameli- 
orations of refined society, and apt, moreover, to relapse 
into the coarseness of the original stock. The men are 
man-like, but the women are not beautiful, though the 
female Bull be well enough adapted to the male. To 
return to the lasses of Greenwich Fair, their charms 
were few, and their behavior, perhaps, not altogether 
commendable ; and yet it was impossible not to feel a 
degree of faith in their innocent intentions, with such 
a half-bashful zest and entire simplicity did they keep up 
their part of the game. It put the spectator in good- 
humor to look at them, because there was still something 
of the old Arcadian life, the secure freedom of the an- 
tique age, in their way of surrendering their lips to 
strangers, as if there were no evil or impurity in the 
world. As for the young men, they were chiefly speci- 
mens of the vulgar sediment of London life, often shab- 
bily genteel, rowdyish, pale, wearing the unbrushed coat, 
unshifted linen, and unwashed faces of yesterday, as well 
as the haggardness of last night's jollity in a gin-shop. 
Gathering their character from these tokens, I wondered 



280 A LONDON SUBURB. 

whether there were any reasonable prospect of their fair 
partners returning to their rustic homes with as much in- 
nocence (whatever were its amount or quality) as they 
brought to Greenwich Fair, in spite of the perilous fa- 
miliarity established by Kissing in the Ring. 

The manifold disorders resulting from the fair, at which 
a vast city was brought into intimate relations with a 
comparatively rural district, have at length led to its 
suppression ; this was the very last celebration of it, and 
brought to a close the broad-mouthed merriment of many 
hundred years. Thus my poor sketch, faint as its colors 
are, may acquire some little value in the reader's eyes 
from the consideration that no observer of the coming 
time will ever have an opportunity to give a better. I 
should find it difficult to believe, however, that the queer 
pastime just described, or any moral mischief to which 
that and other customs might pave the way, can have led 
to the overthrow of Greenwich Fair; for it has often 
seemed to me that Englishmen of station and respecta- 
bility, unless of a peculiarly philanthropic turn, have 
neither any faith in the feminine purity of the lower 
orders of their countrywomen, nor the slightest value for 
it, allowing its possible existence. The distinction of 
ranks is so marked, that the English cottage damsel holds 
a position somewhat analogous to that of the negro girl 
in our Southern States. Hence comes inevitable detri- 
ment to the moral condition of those men themselves, 
who forget that the humblest woman has a right and a 
duty to hold herself in the same sanctity as the highest. 
The subject cannot well be discussed in these pages ; but 
I offer it as a serious conviction, from what I have been 
able to observe, that the England of to-day is the un- 



A LONDON SUBURB. 281 

scrupulous old England of Tom Jones and Joseph An- 
drews, Humphrey Clinker and Roderick Random ; and 
in our refined era, just the same as at that more free- 
spoken epoch, this singular people has a certain con- 
tempt for any fine-strained purity, any special squeamish- 
ness, as they consider it, on the part of an ingenuous 
youth. They appear to look upon it as a suspicious 
phenomenon in the masculine character. 

Nevertheless, I by no means take upon me to affirm 
that English morality, as regards the phase here alluded 
to, is really at a lower point than our own. Assuredly, 
I hope so, because, making a higher pretension, or, at all 
events, more carefully hiding whatever may be amiss, we 
are either better than they, or necessarily a great deal 
worse. It impressed me that their open avowal and rec- 
ognition of immoralities served to throw the disease to 
the surface, where it might be more effectually dealt 
with, and leave a sacred interior not utterly profaned, in- 
stead of turning its poison back among the inner vitali- 
ties of the character, at the imminent risk of corrupting 
them all. Be that as it may, these Englishmen are cer- 
tainly a franker and simpler people than ourselves, from 
peer to peasant ; but if we can take it as compensatory 
on our part, (which I leave to be considered), that they 
owe those noble and manly qualities to a coarser grain in 
their nature, and that, with a finer one in ours, we shall 
ultimately acquire a marble polish of which they are un- 
susceptible, I believe that this may be the truth. 



UP THE THAMES. 

The upper portion of Greenwich (where my last arti- 
cle left me loitering) is a cheerful, comely, old-fashioned 
town, the peculiarities of which, if there be any, have 
passed out of my remembrance. As you descend towards 
the Thames, the streets get meaner, and the shabby and 
sunken houses, elbowing one another for frontage, bear the 
sign-boards of beer-shops and eating-rooms, with especial 
promises of whitebait and other delicacies in the fishing 
line. You observe, also, a frequent announcement of 
" Tea Gardens " in the rear ; although, estimating the ca- 
pacity of the premises by their external compass, the en- 
tire sylvan charm and shadowy seclusion of such blissful 
resorts must be limited within a small back-yard. These 
places of cheap sustenance and recreation depend for 
support upon the innumerable pleasure parties who come 
from London Bridge by steamer, at a fare of a few pence, 
and who get as enjoyable a meal for a shilling a head as 
the Ship Hotel would afford a gentleman for a guinea. 

The steamers, which are constantly smoking their pipes 
up and down the Thames, offer much the most agreeable 
mode of getting to London, At least, it might be exceed- 
ingly agreeable, except for the myriad floating particles 
of soot from the stove-pipe, and the heavy heat of mid- 
summer sunshine on the unsheltered deck, or the chill, 
misty air-draught of a cloudy day, and the spiteful little 



UP THE THAMES. 283 

showers of rain that may spatter down upon you at any 
moment, whatever the promise of the sky ; besides which 
there is some slight inconvenience from the inexhaustible 
throng of passengers, who scarcely allow you standing- 
room, nor so much as a breath of unappropriated air, and 
never a chance to sit down. If these difficulties, added 
to the possibility of getting your pocket picked, weigh 
little with you, the panorama along the shores of the mem- 
orable river, and the incidents and shows of passing life 
upon its bosom, render the trip far preferable to the brief, 
yet tiresome shoot along the railway track. On one such 
voyage, a regatta of wherries raced past us, and at once 
involved every soul on board our steamer in the tremen- 
dous excitement of the struggle. The spectacle was but 
a moment- within our view, and presented nothing more 
than a few light skiffs, in each of which sat a single rower, 
bare-armed, and with little apparel, save a shirt and 
drawers, pale, anxious, with every muscle on the stretch, 
and plying his oars in such fashion that the boat skimmed 
along with the aerial celerity of a swallow. I wondered 
at myself for so immediately catching an interest in the 
affair, which seemed to contain no very exalted rivalship 
of manhood ; but, whatever the kind of battle or the prize 
of victory, it stirs one's sympathy immensely, and is even 
awful, to behold the rare sight of a man thoroughly in 
earnest, doing his best, putting forth all there is in him, and 
staking his very soul (as these rowers appeared willing 
to do) on the issue of the contest. Tt was the seventy- 
fourth annual regatta of the Free Watermen of Green- 
wich, and announced itself as under the patronage of the 
Lord Mayor and other distinguished individuals, at whose 
expense, I suppose, a prize-boat was offered to the con- 



284 UP THE THAMES. 

queror, and some small amounts of money to the inferior 
competitors. 

The aspect of London along the Thames, below Bridge, 
as it is called, is by no means so impressive as it ought to 
be, considering what peculiar advantages are offered for 
the display of grand and stately architecture by the pas- 
sage of a river through the midst of a great city. It 
seems, indeed, as if the heart of London had been cleft 
open for the mere purpose of showing how rotten and 
drearily mean it had become. The shore is lined with 
the shabbiest, blackest, and ugliest buildings that can be 
imagined, decayed warehouses with blind windows, and 
wharves that look ruinous ; insomuch that, had I known 
nothing more of the world's metropolis, I might have 
fancied that it had already experienced the downfall which 
I have heard commercial and financial prophets predict 
for it, within the century. And the muddy tide of the 
Thames, reflecting nothing, and hiding a million of un- 
clean secrets within its breast, — a sort of guilty con- 
science, as it were, unwholesome with the rivulets of sin 
that constantly flow into it, — is just the dismal stream to 
glide by such a city. The surface, to be sure, displays 
no lack of activity, being fretted by the passage of a hun- 
dred steamers and covered with a good deal of shipping, 
but mostly of a clumsier build than I had been accus- 
tomed to see in the Mersey : a fact which I complacently 
attributed to the smaller number of American clippers in 
the Thames, and the less prevalent influence of American 
example in refining away the broad-bottomed capacity of 
the old Dutch or English models. 

About midway between Greenwich and London Bridge, 
at a rude landing-place on the left bank of the river, the 



UP THE THAMES. 285 

steamer rings its bell and makes a momentary pause in 
front of a large circular structure, where it may be worth 
our'while to scramble ashore. It indicates the locality of 
one of those prodigious practical blunders that would sup- 
ply John Bull with a topic of inexhaustible ridicule, if 
his cousin Jonathan had committed them, but of which he 
himself perpetrates ten to our one in the mere wantonness 
of wealth that lacks better employment. The circular 
building covers the entrance to the Thames. Tunnel, and 
is surmounted by a dome of glass, so as to throw daylight 
down into the great depth at which the passage of the 
river commences. Descending a wearisome succession of 
staircases, we at last find ourselves, still in the broad 
noon, standing before a closed door, on opening which we 
behold the vista of an arched corridor that extends into 
everlasting midnight. In these days, when glass has been 
applied to so many new purposes, it is a pity that the 
architect had not thought of arching portions of his abor- 
tive tunnel with immense blocks of the lucid substance, 
over which the dusky Thames would have flowed like 
a cloud, making the sub-fluvial avenue only a little 
gloomier than a street of upper London. At present, 
it is illuminated at regular intervals by jets of gas, 
not very brilliantly, yet with lustre enough to show the 
damp plaster of the ceiling and walls, and the massive 
stone pavement, the crevices of which are oozy with 
moisture, not from the incumbent river, but from hidden 
springs in the earth's deeper heart. There are two paral- 
lel corridors, with a wall between, for the separate accom- 
modation of the double throng of foot-passengers, eques- 
trians, and vehicles of all kinds, which was expected to 
roll and reverberate continually through the Tunnel. 



286 UP THE THAMES. 

Only one of them has ever been opened, and its echoes 
are but feebly awakened by infrequent footfalls. 

Yet there seem to be people who spend their lives here, 
and who probably blink like owls. when, once or twice a 
year, perhaps, they happen to climb into the sunshine. 
All along the corridor, which I believe to be a mile in 
extent, we see stalls or shops in little alcoves, kept prin- 
cipally by women ; they were of a ripe age, I was glad 
to observe, and certainly robbed England of none of its 
very moderate supply of feminine loveliness by their deeper 
than tomb-like interment. As you approach, (and they 
are so accustomed to the dusky gaslight that they read 
all your characteristics afar off,) they assail you with hun- 
gry entreaties to buy some of their merchandise, holding 
forth views of the Tunnel put up in cases of Derbyshire 
spar, with a magnifying-glass at one end to make the 
vista more effective. They offer you, besides, cheap jew- 
elry, sunny topazes and resplendent emeralds for sixpence, 
and diamonds as big as the Koh-i-noor at a not much 
heavier cost, together with a multifarious trumpery which 
has died out of the upper world to reappear in this Tar- 
tarean bazaar. That you may fancy yourself still in the 
realms of the living, they urge you to partake of cakes, 
candy, ginger-beer, and such small refreshment, more 
suitable, how r ever, for the shadowy appetite of ghosts than 
for the sturdy stomachs of Englishmen. The most capa- 
cious of the shops contains a dioramic exhibition of cities 
and scenes in the daylight w^orld, with a dreary glimmer 
of gas among them all ; so that they serve well enough to 
represent the dim, unsatisfactory remembrances that dead 
people might be supposed to retain from their past lives, 
mixing them up with the ghastliness of their unsubstan- 



UP THE THAMES. 287 

tial state. I dwell the more upon these trifles, and do 
my best to give them a mockery of importance, her,, 
if these are nothing, then all this elaborate contrivance 
and mighty piece of work has been wrought in vain. The 
Englishman has burrowed under the bed of his great 
river, and set ships of two or three thousand tons a-rolling 
over his head, only to provide new sites for a few old 
women to sell cakes and ginger-beer ! 

Yet the conception was a grand one ; and though it has 
proved an absolute failure, swallowing an immensity of 
toil and money, with annual returns hardly sufficient to 
keep the pavement free from the ooze of subterranean 
springs, yet it needs, I presume, only an expenditure three 
or four (or, for aught I know, twenty) times as large, to 
make the enterprise brilliantly successful. The descent 
is so great from the bank of the river to its surface, and 
the Tunnel dips so profoundly under the river's bed, that 
the approaches on either side must commence a long way 
off, in order to render the entrance accessible to horsemen 
or vehicles ; so that the larger part of the cost of the whole 
affair should have been expended on its margins. It has 
turned out a sublime piece of folly ; and when the New 
Zealander of distant ages shall have moralized sufficiently 
among the ruins of London Bridge, he will bethink 
himself that somewhere thereabout was the marvellous 
Tunnel, the very existence of which will seem to him as 
incredible as that of the hanging gardens of Babylon. But 
the Thames will long ago have broken through the mas- 
sive arch, and choked up the corridors with mud and 
sand and with the large stones of the structure itself, 
intermixed with skeletons of drowned people, the rusty 
iron-work of sunken vessels, and the great many such 



288 UP THE THAMES. 

precious and curious things as a river always contrives to 
hide in its bosom ; the entrance will have been obliterated, 
and its very site forgotten beyond the memory of twenty 
generations of men, and the whole neighborhood be held 
a dangerous spot on account of the malaria; insomuch 
that the traveller will make but a brief and careless in- 
quisition for the traces of the old wonder, and will stake 
his credit before the public, in some Pacific Monthly of 
that day, that the story of it is but a myth, though en- 
riched with a spiritual profundity which he will proceed 
to unfold. 

Yet it is impossible (for a Yankee, at least) to see 
so much magnificent ingenuity thrown away, without try- 
ing to endow the unfortunate result with some kind of 
usefulness, though perhaps widely different from the pur- 
pose of its original conception. In former ages, the mile- 
long corridors, with their numerous alcoves, might have 
been utilized as a series of dungeons, the fittest of all 
possible receptacles for prisoners of state. Dethroned 
monarchs and fallen statesmen would not have needed to 
remonstrate against a domicile so spacious, so deeply 
secluded from the world's scorn, and so admirably in ac- 
cordance with their thenceforward sunless fortunes. An 
alcove here might have suited Sir Walter Raleigh better 
than that darksome hiding-place communicating with the 
great chamber in the Tower, pacing from end to end of 
which he meditated upon his " History of the World." 
His track would here have been straight and narrow, in- 
deed, and would therefore have lacked somewhat of the 
freedom that his intellect demanded ; and yet the length 
to which his footsteps might have travelled forth and 
retraced tffemselves would partly have harmonized his 



UP THE THAMES. 289 

physical movement with the grand curves and planetary 
returns of his thought, through cycles of majestic peri- 
ods. Having it in his mind to compose the world's his- 
tory, methinks he could have asked no better retirement 
than such a cloister as this, insulated from all the seduc- 
tions of mankind and womankind, deep beneath their 
mysteries and motives, down into the heart of things, full 
of personal reminiscences in order to the comprehensive 
measurement and verification of historic records, seeing 
into the secrets of human nature, — secrets that daylight 
never yet revealed to mortal, — but detecting their whole 
scope and purport with the infallible eyes of unbroken 
solitude and night. And then the shades of the old 
mighty men might have risen from their still profounder 
abodes and joined him in the dim corridor, treading be- 
side him with an antique stateliness of mien, telling him 
in melancholy tones, grand, but always melancholy, of 
the greater ideas and purposes which their most renowned 
performances so imperfectly carried out, that, magnificent 
successes in the view of all posterity, they were but fail- 
ures to those who planned them. As Raleigh was a 
navigator, Noah would have explained to him the pecu- 
liarities of construction that made the ark so seaworthy ; 
as Raleigh was a statesman, Moses would have discussed 
witli him the principles of laws and government ; as 
Raleigh was a soldier, Caesar and Hannibal would have 
held debate in his presence, with this martial student 
for their umpire ; as Raleigh was a poet, David, or 
whatever most illustrious bard he might call up, would 
have touched his harp, and made manifest all the true 
significance of the past by means of song and the subtle 
intelligences of music. 
19 



290 UP THE THAMES. 

Meanwhile, I had forgotten that Sir Walter Raleigh's 
century knew nothing of gaslight, and that it would re- 
quire a prodigious and wasteful expenditure of tallow- 
candles to illuminate the Tunnel sufficiently to discern 
even a ghost. On tins account, however, it would be all 
the more suitable place of confinement for a metaphysi- 
cian, to keep him from bewildering mankind with his 
shadowy speculations ; and, being shut off from external 
converse, the dark corridor would help him to make rich 
discoveries in those cavernous regions and mysterious 
by-paths of the intellect, which he had so long accus- 
tomed himself to explore. But how would every succes- 
sive age rejoice in so secure a habitation for its reformers, 
and especially for each best and wisest man that happened 
to be then alive ! He seeks to burn up our whole system 
of society, under pretence of purifying it from its abuses ! 
Away with him into the Tunnel, and let him begin by 
setting the Thames on fire, if he is able ! 

If not precisely these, yet akin to these were some of 
the fantasies that haunted me as I passed under the 
river : for the place is suggestive of such idle and irre- 
sponsible stuff by its own abortive character, its lack of 
whereabout on upper earth, or any solid foundation of 
realities. Could I have looked forward a few years, I 
might have regretted that American enterprise had not 
provided a similar tunnel, under the Hudson or the Poto- 
mac, for the convenience of our National Government in 
times hardly yet gone by. It would be delightful to 
clap up all the enemies of our peace and Union in the 
dark together, and there let them abide, listening to the 
monotonous roll of the river above their heads, or per- 
haps in a state of miraculously suspended animation, 



UP THE THAMES. 291 

until, — be it after months, years, or centuries, — when 
the turmoil shall be all over, the Wrong washed away in 
blood, (since that must needs be the cleansing fluid,) and 
the Right firmly rooted in the soil which that blood will 
have enriched, they might crawl forth again and catch a 
single glimpse at their redeemed country, and feel it to 
be a better land than they deserve, and die ! 

I was not sorry when the daylight reached me after a 
much briefer abode in the nether regions than, I fear, 
would await the troublesome personages just hinted at. 
Emerging on the Surrey side of the Thames, I found 
myself in Rotherhithe, a neighborhood not unfamiliar to 
the readers of old books of maritime adventure. There 
being a ferry hard by the mouth of the Tunnel, I re- 
crossed t|ie river in the primitive fashion of an open 
boat, which the conflict of wind and tide, together with 
the swash and swell of the passing steamers, tossed high 
and low rather tumultuously. This inquietude of our 
frail skiff (which, indeed, bobbed up and down like a 
cork) so much alarmed an old lady, the only other pas- 
senger, that the boatmen essayed to comfort her. " Never 
fear, mother ! " grumbled one of them, " we'll make the 
river as smooth as we can for you. We'll get a plane 
and plane down the waves ! " The joke may not read 
very brilliantly ; but I make bold to record it as the only 
specimen that reached my ears of the old, rough water- 
wit for which the Thames used to be so celebrated. 
Passing directly along the line of the sunken Tunnel, w r e 
landed in Wapping, which I should have presupposed to 
be the most tarry and pitchy spot on earth, swarming 
with old salts, and full of warm, bustling, coarse, homely, 
and cheerful life. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a 



292 UP THE THAMES. 

cold and torpid neighborhood, mean, shabby, and unpic- 
turesque, both as to its buildings and inhabitants : the 
latter comprising (so far as was visible to me) not a 
single unmistakable sailor, though plenty of land-sharks, 
who get a half dishonest livelihood by business connected 
with the sea. Ale and spirit vaults (as petty drinking 
establishments are styled in England, pretending to con- 
tain vast cellars full of liquor within the compass of ten 
feet square above ground) were particularly abundant, 
together with apples, oranges, and oysters, the stalls of 
fishmongers and butchers, and slop-shops, where blue 
jackets and duck trousers swung and capered before the 
doors. Everything was on the poorest scale, and the 
place bore an aspect of unredeemable decay. From this 
remote point of London, I strolled leisurely towards the 
heart of the city ; while the streets, at first but thinly 
occupied by man or vehicle, got more and more thronged 
with foot-passengers, carts, drays, cabs, and the all-per- 
vading and all-accommodating omnibus. But I lack 
courage, and feel that I should lack perseverance, as 
the gentlest reader would lack patience*, to undertake 
a descriptive stroll through London streets ; more espe- 
cially as there would be a volume ready for the printer 
before we could reach a midway resting-place at Char- 
ing Cross. It will be the easier course to step aboard 
another passing steamer, and continue our trip up the 
Thames. 

The next notable group of objects is an assemblage of 
ancient walls, battlements, and turrets, out of the midst 
of which rises prominently one great square tower, of a 
grayish hue, bordered with white stone, and having a 
small turret at each corner of the roof. This central 



UP THE THAMES. 293 

structure is the White Tower, and the whole circuit of 
ramparts and enclosed edifices constitutes what is known 
in English history, and still more widely and impressively 
in English poetry, as the Tower. A crowd of river- 
craft are generally moored in front of it ; but if we look 
sharply at the right moment under the base of the ram- 
part, we may catch a glimpse of an arched water- 
entrance, half submerged, past which the Thames glides 
as indifferently as if it were the mouth of a city-kennel. 
Nevertheless, it is the Traitor's Gate, a dreary kind of 
triumphal passage-way, (now supposed to be shut up and 
barred forever,) through which a multitude of noble and 
illustrious personages have entered the Tower, and found 
it a brief resting-place on their way to heaven. Passing 
it many times, I never observed that anybody glanced at 
this shadowy and ominous trap-door, save myself. It is 
well that America exists, if it were only that her vagrant 
children may be impressed and affected by the historical 
monuments of England in a degree of which the native 
inhabitants are evidently incapable. These matters are 
too familiar, too real, and too hopelessly built in amongst 
and mixed up with the common objects and affairs of life, 
to be easily susceptible of imaginative coloring in their 
minds ; and even their poets and romancers feel it a toil, 
and almost a delusion, to extract poetic material out of 
what seems embodied poetry itself to an American. An 
Englishman cares nothing about the Tower, which to us 
is a haunted castle in dreamland. That honest and excel- 
lent gentleman, the late Mr. G. P. R. James, (whose 
mechanical ability, one might have supposed, would nour- 
ish itself by devouring every old stone of such a struct- 
ure,) once assured me that he had never in his life 



294 UP THE THAMES. 

set eyes upon the Tower, though for years an historic 
novelist in London. 

Not to spend a whole summer's day upon the voyage, 
we will suppose ourselves to have reached London Bridge, 
and thence to have taken another steamer for a farther 
passage up the river. But here the memorable objects 
succeed each other so rapidly that I can spare but a 
single sentence even for the great Dome, though I deem 
it more picturesque, in that dusky atmosphere, than St. 
Peter's in its clear blue sky. I must mention, however, 
(since everything connected with royalty is especially in- 
teresting to my dear countrymen,) that I once saw a large 
and beautiful barge, splendidly gilded and ornamented, 
and overspread with a rich covering, lying at the pier 
nearest to St. Paul's Cathedral ; it had the royal banner 
of Great Britain displayed, besides being decorated with 
a number of other flags ; and many footmen (who are 
universally the grandest and gaudiest objects to be seen 
in England at this day, and these were regal ones, in a 
bright scarlet livery bedizened with gold lace, and white 
silk stockings) were in attendance. I know not what 
festive or ceremonial occasion may have drawn out this 
pageant ; after all, it might have been merely a city- 
spectacle, appertaining to the Lord Mayor ; but the sight 
had its value in bringing vividly before me the grand old 
times when the sovereign and nobles were accustomed 
to use the Thames as the high street of the metropolis, 
and join in pompous processions upon it ; whereas, the 
desuetude of such customs, nowadays^ has caused the 
whole show of river-life to consist in a multitude of 
smoke-begrimed steamers. An analogous change has 
taken place in the streets, where cabs and the omnibus 



UP THE THAMES. 295 

have crowded out a rich variety of vehicles ; and thus 
life gets more monotonous in hue from age to age, and 
appears to seize every opportunity to strip off a bit of its 
gold lace among the wealthier classes, and to make itself 
decent in the lower ones. 

Yonder is Whitefriars, the old rowdy Alsatia, now 
wearing as decorous a face as any other portion of Lon- 
don ; and, adjoining it, the avenues and brick squares of 
the Temple, with that historic garden, close upon the 
riverside, and still rich in shrubbery and flowers, where 
the partisans of York and Lancaster plucked the fatal 
roses, and scattered their pale and bloody petals over so 
many English battlefields. Hard by, we see the long 
white front or rear of Somerset House, and, farther on, 
rise the two new Houses of Parliament, with a huge 
unfinished tower already hiding its imperfect summit in 
the smoky canopy, — the whole vast and cumbrous edifice 
a specimen of the best that modern architecture can 
effect, elaborately imitating the masterpieces of those 
simple ages when men " builded better than they knew." 
Close by it, we have a glimpse of the roof and upper 
towers of the holy Abbey ; while that gray, ancestral 
pile on the opposite side of the river is Lambeth Palace, 
a venerable group of halls and turrets, chiefly built of 
brick, but with at least one large tower of stone. In our 
course, we have passed beneath half a dozen bridges, and, 
emero-ino- out of the black heart of London, shall soon 
reach a cleanly suburb, where old Father Thames, if I 
remember, begins to put on an aspect of unpolluted inno- 
cence. And now we look back upon the mass of innu- 
merable roofs, out of which rise steeples, towers, columns, 
and the great crowning Dome, — look back, in short, 



296 UP THE THAMES. 

upon that mystery of the world's proudest city, amid 
which a man so longs and loves to be : not, perhaps, be- 
cause it contains much that is positively admirable and 
enjoyable, but because, at all events, the world has noth- 
ing better. The cream of external life is there ; and 
whatever merely intellectual or material good we fail to 
find perfect in London, we may as well content ourselves 
to seek that unattainable thing no farther on this earth. 

The steamer terminates its trip at Chelsea, an old 
town endowed with a prodigious number of pot-houses, 
and some famous gardens, called the Cremorne, for public 
amusement. The most noticeable thing, however, is 
Chelsea Hospital, which, like that of Greenwich, was 
founded, I believe, by Charles II., (whose bronze statue, 
in the guise of an old Roman, stands in the centre of the 
quadrangle,) and appropriated as a home for aged and 
infirm soldiers of the British army. The edifices are of 
three stories with windows in the high roofs, and are 
built of dark, sombre brick, with stone edgings and fac- 
ings. The effect is by no means that of grandeur, (which 
is somewhat disagreeably an attribute of Greenwich Hos- 
pital,) but a quiet and venerable neatness. At each ex- 
tremity of the street-front there is a spacious and hospi- 
tably open gateway, lounging about which I saw some 
gray veterans in long scarlet coats of an antique fashion, 
and the cocked hats of a century ago, or occasionally a 
modem foraging-cap. Almost all of them moved with a 
rheumatic gait, two or three stumped on wooden legs, and 
here and there an arm was missing. Inquiring of one 
of these fragmentary heroes whether a stranger could be 
admitted to see the establishment, he replied most cordi- 
ally, " O yes, Sir, — anywhere ! Walk in and go where 



UP THE THAMES. 297 

you please, — up-stairs, or anywhere ! " So I entered, 
and, passing along the inner side of the quadrangle, came 
to the door of the chapel, which forms a part of the con- 
tiguity of edifices next the street. Here another pen- 
sioner, an old warrior of exceedingly peaceable and Chris- 
tian demeanor, touched his three-cornered hat and asked 
if I wished to see the interior ; to which I assenting, he 
unlocked the door, and we went in. 

The chapel consists of a great hall with a vaulted roof, 
and over the altar is a large painting in fresco, the subject 
of which I did not trouble myself to make out. More 
appropriate adornments of the place, dedicated as well to 
martial reminiscences as religious worship, are the long 
ranges of dusty and tattered banners that hang from their 
staves all round the ceiling of the chapel. They are 
trophies of battles fought and won in every quarter of 
the world, comprising the captured flags of all the nations 
with whom the British lion has waged war since James 
II.'s time, — French, Dutch, East Indian, Prussian, Rus- 
sian, Chinese, and American, — collected together in this 
consecrated spot, not to symbolize that there shall be 
no more discord upon earth, but drooping over the aisle 
in sullen, though peaceable humiliation. Yes, I said 
" American " among the rest ; for the good old pensioner 
mistook me for an Englishman, and failed not to point 
out (and, methought, with an especial emphasis of tri- 
umph) some flags that had been taken at Bladensburg 
and Washington. I fancied, indeed, that they hung a 
little higher and drooped a little lower than any of their 
companions in disgrace. It is a comfort, however, that 
their proud devices are already indistinguishable, or nearly 
so, owing to dust and tatters and the kind offices of the 



298 UP THE THAMES. 

moths, and that they will soon rot from the banner-staves 
and be swept out in unrecognized fragments from the 
chapel-door. 

It is a good method of teaching a man how imperfectly 
cosmopolitan he is, to show him his country's flag occupy- 
ing a position of dishonor in a foreign land. But, in truth, 
the whole system of a people crowing over its military 
triumphs had far better be dispensed with, both on ac- 
count of the ill-blood that it helps to keep fermenting 
among the nations, and because it operates as an accumu- 
lative inducement to future generations to aim at a kind 
of glory, the gain of which has generally proved more 
ruinous than its loss. I heartily wish that every trophy 
of victory might crumble away, and that every reminis- 
cence or tradition of a hero, from the beginning of the 
world to this day, could pass out of all men's memories at 
once and forever. I might feel very differently, to be 
sure, if we Northerners had anything especially valuable 
to lose by the fading of those illuminated names. 

I gave the pensioner (but I am afraid there may have 
been a little affectation in it) a magnificent guerdon of 
all the silver I had in my pocket, to requite him for hav- 
ing unintentionally stirred up my patriotic susceptibilities. 
He was a meek -looking, kindly old man, with a humble 
freedom and affability of manner that made it pleasant 
to converse with him. Old soldiers, I know not why, 
seem to be more accostable than old sailors. One is apt 
to hear a growl beneath the smoothest courtesy of the 
latter. The mild veteran, with his peaceful voice, and 
gentle, reverend aspect, told me that he had fought at a 
cannon all through the Battle of Waterloo, and escaped 
unhurt ; he had now been in the hospital four or five 



UP THE THAMES. 299 

years, and was married, but necessarily underwent a sepa- 
ration from his wife, who lived outside of the gates. To 
my inquiry whether his fellow-pensioners were comfortable 
and happy, he answered, with great alacrity, " O yes, 
Sir ! " qualifying his evidence, after a moment's considera- 
tion, by saying, in an undertone, " There are some people, 
your Honor knows, who could not be comfortable any- 
where." I did know it, and fear that the system of Chel- 
sea Hospital allows too little of that wholesome care and 
regulation of their own occupations and interests which 
might assuage the sting of life to those naturally uncom- 
fortable individuals by giving them something external to 
think about. But my old friend here was happy in the 
hospital^ and by this time, very likely, is happy in heaven, 
in spite of the bloodshed that he may have caused by 
touching off a cannon at Waterloo. 

Crossing Battersea Bridge, in the neighborhood of 
Chelsea, I remember seeing a distant gleam of the Crys- 
tal Palace, glimmering afar in the afternoon sunshine like 
an imaginary structure, — an air-castle by chance de- 
scended upon earth, and resting there one instant before 
it vanished, as we sometimes see a soap-bubble touch un- 
harmed on the carpet, — a thing of only momentary visi- 
bility and no substance, destined to be overburdened and 
crushed down by the first cloud-shadow that might fall 
upon that spot. Even as I looked, it disappeared. Shall 
I attempt a picture of this exhalation of modern inge- 
nuity, or what else shall I try to paint ? Everything in 
London and its vicinity has been depicted innumerable 
times, but never once translated into intelligible images ; 
it is an " old, old story," never yet told, nor to be told. 
While writing these reminiscences, I am continually im- 



300 UP THE THAMES. 

pressed with the futility of the effort to give any creative 
truth to my sketch, so that it might produce such pictures 
in the reader's mind as would cause the original scenes 
to appear familiar when afterwards beheld. Nor have 
other writers often been more successful in representing 
definite objects prophetically to my own mind. In truth, 
I believe that the chief delight and advantage of this 
kind of literature is not for any real information that it 
supplies to untravelled people, but for reviving the recol- 
lections and reawakening the emotions of persons already 
acquainted with the scenes described. Thus I found an 
exquisite pleasure, the other day, in reading Mr. Tucker- 
man's " Month in England," — a fine example of the way 
in which a refined and cultivated American looks at the 
Old Country, the things that he naturally seeks there, 
and the modes of feeling and reflection which they excite. 
Correct outlines avail little or nothing, though truth of 
coloring may be somewhat more efficacious. Impressions, 
however, states of mind produced by interesting and re- 
markable objects, these, if truthfully and vividly recorded, 
may work a genuine effect, and, though but the result of 
what we see, go farther towards representing the actual 
scene than any direct effort to paint it. Give the emo- 
tions that cluster about it, and, without being able to ana- 
lyze the spell by which it is summoned up, you get some- 
thing like a simulachre of the object in the midst of 
them. From some of the above reflections I draw the 
comfortable inference, that, the longer and better known 
a thing may be, so much the more eligible is it as the 
subject of -a descriptive sketch. 

On a Sunday afternoon, I passed through a side-en- 
trance in the time-blackened wall of a place of worship, 



UP THE THAMES. 301 

and found myself among a congregation assembled in one 
of the transepts and the immediately contiguous portion 
of the nave. It was a vast old edifice, spacious enough, 
within the extent covered by its pillared roof and over- 
spread by its stone pavement, to accommodate the whole 
of church-going London, and with a far wider and loftier 
concave than any human power of lungs could fill with 
audible prayer. Oaken benches were arranged in the 
transept, on one of which I seated myself, and joined, as 
well as I knew how, in the sacred business that was going 
forward. But when it came to the sermon, the voice of 
the preacher was puny, and so were his thoughts, and 
both seemed impertinent at such a time and place, where 
he and all of us were bodily included within a sublime 
act of religion, which could be seen above and around us 
and felt beneath our feet. The structure itself was the 
worship of the devout men of long ago, miraculously pre- 
served in stone without losing an atom of its fragrance 
and fervor ; it was a kind of anthem-strain that they had 
sung and poured out of the organ in centuries gone by ; 
and being so grand and sweet, the Divine benevolence 
had willed it to be prolonged for the behoof of auditors 
unborn. I therefore came to the conclusion, that, in my 
individual case, it would be better and more reverent to 
let my eyes wander about the edifice than to fasten them 
and my thoughts on the evidently uninspired mortal who 
was venturing — and felt it no venture at all — to speak 
here above his breath. 

The interior of Westminster Abbey (for the reader 
recognized it, no doubt, the moment we entered) is built 
of rich brown stone ; and the whole of it — the lofty 
roof, the tall, clustered pillars, and the pointed arches — 



302 UP THE THAMES. 

appears to be in consummate repair. At all points where 
decay has laid its finger, the structure is clamped with 
iron, or otherwise carefully protected ; and being thus 
watched over, — whether as a place of ancient sanctity, a 
noble specimen of Gothic art, or an object of national 
interest and pride, — it may reasonably be expected to 
survive for as many ages as have passed over it already. 
It was sweet to feel its venerable quietude, its long-endur- 
ing peace, and yet to observe how kindly and even cheer- 
fully it received the sunshine of to-day, which fell from 
the great windows into the fretted aisles and arches that 
laid aside somewhat of their aged gloom to welcome it. 
Sunshine always seems friendly to old abbeys, churches, 
and castles, kissing them, as it were, with a more affec- 
tionate, though still reverential familiarity, than it accords 
to edifices of later date. A square of golden light lay on 
the sombre pavement of the nave, afar off, falling through 
the grand western entrance, the folding leaves of which 
were wide open, and afforded glimpses of people passing 
to and fro in the outer world, while we sat dimly envel- 
oped in the solemnity of antique devotion. In the south 
transept, separated from us by the full breadth of the 
minster, there were painted glass windows, of which the 
uppermost appeared to be a great orb of many-colored 
radiance, being, indeed, a cluster of saints and angels 
whose glorified bodies formed the rays of an aureole 
emanating from a cross in the midst. These windows 
are modern, but combine softness with wonderful bril- 
liancy of effect. Through the pillars and arches, I saw 
that the walls in that distant region of the edifice were 
almost wholly incrusted with marble, now grown yellow 
with time, no blank, unlettered slabs, but memorials of 



UP THE THAMES. 303 

such men as their respective generations deemed Avisest 
and bravest. Some of them were commemorated merely 
by inscriptions on mural tablets, others by sculptured bas- 
reliefs, others (once famous, but now forgotten generals or 
admirals, these) by ponderous tombs that aspired towards 
the roof of the aisle, or partly curtained the immense arch 
of a window. These mountains of marble were peopled 
with the sisterhood of Allegory, winged trumpeters, and 
classic figures in full-bottomed wigs ; but it was strange to 
observe how the old Abbey melted all such absurdities into 
the breadth of its own grandeur, even magnifying itself 
by what would elsewhere have been ridiculous. Methinks 
it is the test of Gothic sublimity to overpower the ridic- 
ulous without deigning to hide it ; and these grotesque 
monuments of the last century answer a similar purpose 
with the grinning faces which the old architects scattered 
among their most solemn conceptions. 

From these distant wanderings, (it was my first visit 
to Westminster Abbey, and I would gladly have taken it 
all in at a glance,) my eyes came back and began to in- 
vestigate what was immediately about me in the transept. 
Close at my elbow was the pedestal of Canning's statue. 
Next beyond it was a massive tomb, on the spacious tab- 
let of which reposed the full-length figures of a marble 
lord and lady, whom an inscription announced to be the 
Duke and Duchess of Newcastle, -*- the historic Duke 
of Charles I.'s time, and the fantastic Duchess, tradition- 
ally remembered by her poems and plays. She was of 
a family, as the record on her tomb proudly informed us, 
of which all the brothers had been valiant and all the 
sisters virtuous. A recent statue of Sir John Malcolm, 
the new marble as white as snow, held the next place ; 



304 UP THE THAMES. 

and near by was a mural monument and bust of Sir 
Peter Warren. The round visage of this old British 
admiral has a certain interest for a New Englander, be- 
cause it was by no merit of his own, (though he took 
care to assume it as such,) but by the valor and warlike 
enterprise of our colonial forefathers, especially the stout 
men of Massachusetts, that he won rank and renown, 
and a tomb in Westminster Abbey. Lord Mansfield, a 
huge mass of marble done into the guise of a judicial 
gown and wig, with a stern face in the midst of the lat- 
ter, sat on the other side of the transept ; and on the 
pedestal beside him was a figure of Justice, holding forth, 
instead of the customary grocer's scales, an actual pair 
of brass steelyards. It is an ancient and classic instru- 
ment, undoubtedly ; but I had supposed that Portia 
(when Shylock's pound of flesh was to be weighed) was 
the only judge that ever really called for it in a court of 
justice. Pitt and Fox were in the same distinguished 
company ; and John Kemble, in Roman costume, stood 
not far off, but strangely shorn of the dignity that is said 
to have enveloped him like a mantle in his lifetime. 
Perhaps the evanescent majesty of the stage is incom- 
patible with the long endurance of marble and the sol- 
emn reality of the tomb ; though, on the other hand, 
almost every illustrious personage here represented has 
been invested with more or less of stage-trickery by his 
sculptor. In truth, the artist (unless there be a divine 
efficacy in his touch, making evident a heretofore hidden 
dignity in the actual form) feels it an imperious law to 
remove his subject as far from the aspect of ordinary life 
as may be possible without sacrificing every trace of re- 
semblance. The absurd effect of the contrary course is 



UP THE THAMES. 305 

very remarkable in the statue of Mr. Wilberforce, whose 
actual self, save for the lack of color, I seemed to behold, 
seated just across the aisle. 

This excellent man appears to have sunk into himself 
in a sitting posture, with a thin leg crossed over his knee, 
a book in one hand, and a finger of the other under his 
chin, I believe, or applied to the side of his nose, or to 
some equally familiar purpose ; while his exceedingly 
homely and wrinkled face, held a little on one side, twin- 
kles at you with the shrewdest complacency, as if he were 
looking right into your eyes, and twigged something there 
which you had half a mind to conceal from him. - He 
keeps this look so pertinaciously that you feel it to be 
insufferably impertinent, and bethink yourself what com- 
mon ground there may be between yourself and a stone 
image, enabling you to resent it. I have no doubt that 
the statue is as like Mr. Wilberforce as one pea to an- 
other, and you might fancy, that, at some ordinary mo- 
ment, when he least expected it, and before he had time 
to smooth away his knowing complication of wrinkles, he 
had seen the Gorgon's head, and whitened into marble, — 
not only his personal self, but his coat and small-clothes, 
down to a button and the minutest crease of the cloth. 
The ludicrous result marks the impropriety of bestowing 
the age-long duration of marble upon small, characteristic 
individualities, such as might come within the province 
of waxen imagery. The sculptor should give perma- 
nence to the figure of a great man in his mood of broad 
and grand composure, which would obliterate all mean 
peculiarities ; for, if the original were unaccustomed to 
such a mood, or if his features were incapable of assum- 
ing the guise, it seems questionable whether he could 

20 



306 UP THE THAMES. 

really have been entitled to a marble immortality. In 
point of fact, however, the English face and form are 
seldom statuesque, however illustrious the individual. 

It ill becomes me, perhaps, to have lapsed into this 
mood of half-jocose criticism in describing my first visit 
to Westminster Abbey, a spot which I had dreamed 
about more reverentially, from my childhood upward, 
than any other in the world, and which I then beheld, 
and now look back upon, with profound gratitude to the 
men who built it, and a kindly interest, I may add, in the 
humblest personage that has contributed his little all to 
its impressiveness, by depositing his dust or his memory 
there. But it is a characteristic of this grand edifice 
that it permits you to smile as freely under the roof of 
its central nave as if you stood beneath the yet grander 
canopy of heaven. Break into laughter, if you feel in- 
clined, provided the vergers do not hear it echoing among 
the arches. In an ordinary church you would keep your 
countenance for fear of disturbing the sanctities or pro- 
prieties of the place ; but you need leave no honest and 
decorous portion of your human nature outside of these 
benign and truly hospitable walls. Their mild awfulness 
will take care of itself. Thus it does no harm to the 
general impression, when you come to be sensible that 
many of the monuments are ridiculous, and commemorate 
a mob of people who are mostly forgotten in their graves, 
and few of whom ever deserved any better boon from 
posterity. You acknowledge the force of Sir Godfrey 
Kneller's objection to being buried in Westminster Ab- 
bey, because " they do bury fools there ! " Nevertheless, 
these grotesque carvings of marble, that break out in 
dingy-white blotches on the old freestone of the interior 



# JJP THE THAMES. 307 

walls, have come there by as natural a process as might 
cause mosses and ivy to cluster about the external edifice ; 
for they are the historical and biographical record of 
each successive age, written with its own hand, and all 
the truer for the inevitable mistakes, and none the less 
solemn for the occasional absurdity. Though you en- 
tered the Abbey expecting to see the tombs only of the 
illustrious, you are content at last to read many names, 
both in literature and history, that have now lost the 
reverence of mankind, if indeed they ever really pos- 
sessed it. Let these men rest in peace. Even if you 
miss a name or two that you hoped to find there, they 
may well be spared. It matters little a few more or less, 
or whether Westminster Abbey contains or lacks any 
one man's grave, so long as the Centuries, each with the 
crowd of personages that it deemed memorable, have 
chosen it as their place of honored sepulture, and laid 
themselves down under its pavement. The inscriptions 
and devices on the walls are rich with evidences of the 
fluctuating tastes, fashions, manners, opinions, prejudices, 
follies, wisdoms of the past, and thus they combine into a 
more truthful memorial of their dead times than any in- 
dividual epitaph-maker ever meant to write. 

When the services were over, many of the audience 
seemed inclined to linger in the nave or wander away 
among the mysterious aisles ; for there is nothing in this 
world so fascinating as a Gothic minster, which always 
invites you deeper and deeper into its heart both by vast 
revelations and shadowy concealments. Through the 
open-work screen that divides the nave from the chancel 
and choir, we could discern the gleam of a marvellous 
window, but were debarred from entrance into that more 



*08 UP THE THAMES. # 

sacred precinct of the Abbey by the vergers. These 
,vigilant officials (doing their duty all the more strenu- 
ously because no fees could be exacted from Sunday 
visitors) nourished their staves, and drove us towards the 
grand entrance like a flock of sheep. Lingering through 
one of the aisles, I happened to look down, and found my 
foot upon a stone inscribed with this familiar exclamation, 
"0 rare Ben Jonson!" and remembered the story of 
stout old Ben's burial in that spot, standing upright, — 
not, I presume, on account of any unseemly reluctance 
on his part to lie down in the dust, like other men, but 
because standing-room was all that could reasonably be 
demanded for a poet among the slumberous notabilities 
of his age. It made me weary to think of it ! — such a 
prodigious length of time to keep one's feet ! — apart 
from the honor of the thing, it would certainly have been 
better for Ben to stretch himself at ease in some country- 
churchyard. To this day, however, I fancy that there is 
a contemptuous alloy mixed up with the admiration 
which the higher classes of English society profess for 
their literary men. 

Another day — in truth, many other days — I sought 
out Poets' Corner, and found a sign-board and pointed 
finger, directing the visitor to it, on the corner house of 
a little lane leading towards the rear of the Abbey. The 
entrance is at the southeastern end of the south transept, 
and it is used, on ordinary occasions, as the only free 
mode of access to the building. It is no spacious arch, 
but a small, lowly door, passing through which, and push- 
ing aside an inner screen that partly keeps out an exceed- 
ingly chill wind, you find yourself in a dim nook of the 
Abbey, with the busts of poets gazing at you from the 



UP THE THAMES. 309 

otherwise bare stonework of the walls. Great poets, 
too ; for Ben Jonson is right behind the door, and Spen- 
ser's tablet is next, and Butler's on the same side of the 
transept, and Milton's (whose bust you know at once by 
its resemblance to one of his portraits, though older, more 
wrinkled, and sadder than that) is close by, and a profile- 
medallion of Gwiy beneath it. A window high aloft 
sheds down a dusky daylight on these and many other 
sculptured marbles, now as yellow as old parchment, that 
cover the three walls of the nook up to an elevation of 
about twenty feet above the pavement. It seemed to me 
that I had always been familiar with the spot. Enjoying 
a humble intimacy — and how much of my life had else 
been a dreary solitude ! — with many of its inhabitants, 
I could not feel myself a stranger there. It was delight- 
ful to be among them. There was a genial awe, mingled 
with a sense of kind and friendly presences about me ; 
and I was glad, moreover, at finding so many of them 
there together, in fit companionship, mutually recognized 
and duly honored, all reconciled now, whatever distant 
generations, whatever personal hostility or other miser- 
able impediment, had divided them far asunder while 
they lived. I have never felt a similar interest in any 
other tombstones, nor have I ever been deeply moved by 
the imaginary presence of other famous dead people. 
A poet's ghost is the only one that survives for his fellow- 
mortals, after his bones are in the dust, — and he not 
ghostly, but cherishing many hearts with his own warmth 
in the chillest atmosphere of life. What other fame is 
worth aspiring for ? Or, let me speak it more boldly, 
what other long-enduring fame can exist ? We neither 
remember nor care anything for the past, except as the 



310 UP THE THAMES. 

poet has made it intelligibly noble and sublime to our 
comprehension. The shades of the mighty have no sub- 
stance ; they flit ineffectually about the darkened stage 
where they performed their momentary parts, save when 
the poet has thrown his own creative soul into them, and 
imparted a more vivid life than ever they were able to 
manifest to mankind while they dwelt in the body. And 
therefore — though he cunningly disguises himself in their 
armor, their robes of state, or kingly purple — it is not 
the statesman, the warrior, or the monarch that survives, 
but the despised poet, whom they may have fed with 
their crumbs, and to whom they owe all that they now 
are or have, — a name ! 

In the foregoing paragraph I seem to have been be- 
trayed into a flight above or beyond the customary level 
that best agrees with me ; but it represents fairly enough 
the emotions with which I passed from Poets' Corner into 
the chapels, which contain the sepulchres of kings and 
great people. They are magnificent even now, and must 
have been inconceivably so when the marble slabs and 
pillars wore their new polish, and the statues retained 
the brilliant colors with which they were originally 
painted, and the shrines their rich gilding, of which the 
sunlight still shows a glimmer or a streak, though the 
sunbeam itself looks tarnished with antique dust. Yet 
this recondite portion of the Abbey presents few memo- 
rials of personages whom we care to remember. The 
shrine of Edward the Confessor has a certain interest, 
because it was so long held in religious reverence, and 
because the very dust that settled upon it was formerly 
worth gold. The helmet and war-saddle of Henry V., 
worn at Agincourt, and now suspended above his tomb, 



UP THE THAMES. 311 

are memorable objects, but more for Shakspeare's sake 
than the victor's own. Rank has been the general pass- 
port to admission here. Noble and regal dust is as cheap 
as dirt under the pavement. I am glad to recollect, 
indeed, (and it is too characteristic of the right English 
spirit not to be mentioned,) one or two gigantic statues of 
great mechanicians, who contributed largely to the mate- 
rial welfare of England, sitting familiarly in their marble 
chairs among forgotten kings and queens. Otherwise, 
the quaintness of the earlier monuments, and the antique 
beauty of some of them, are what chiefly gives them 
value. Nevertheless, Addison is buried among the men 
of rank ; not on the plea of his literary fame, however, 
but because he w T as connected with nobility by marriage, 
and had been a Secretary of State. His gravestone is 
inscribed with a resounding verse from Tickell's lines to 
his memory, the only lines by which Tickell himself is 
now remembered, and which (as I discovered a little 
while ago) he mainly filched from an obscure versifier of 
somewhat earlier date. 

Returning to Poets' Corner, I looked again at the walls, 
and wondered how the requisite hospitality can be shown 
to poets of our own and the succeeding ages. There 
is hardly a foot of space left, although room has lately 
been found for a bust of Southey and a full-length statue 
of Campbell. At best, only a little portion of the Abbey 
is dedicated to poets, literary men, musical composers, 
and others of the gentle artist breed, and even into that 
small nook of sanctity men of other pursuits have thought 
it decent to intrude themselves. Methinks the tuneful 
throng, being at home here, should recollect how they 
were treated in their lifetime, and turn the cold shoulder, 



312 UP THE THAMES. 

looking askance at nobles and official personages, however 
worthy of honorable interment elsewhere. Yet it shows 
aptly and truly enough what portion of the world's regard 
and honor has heretofore been awarded to literary emi- 
nence in comparison with other modes of greatness, — 
this dimly lighted corner (nor even that quietly to them- 
selves) in the vast minster, the walls of which are 
sheathed and hidden under marble that has been wasted 
upon the illustrious obscure. Nevertheless, it may not 
be worth while to quarrel with, the world on this account ; 
for, to confess the very truth, their own little nook con- 
tains more than one poet whose memory is kept alive by 
his monument, instead of imbuing the senseless stone 
with a spiritual immortality, — men of whom you do not 
ask, " Where is he ? " but " Why is he here ? " I esti- 
mate that all the literary people who really make an 
essential part of one's inner life, including the period 
since English literature first existed, might have ample 
elbow.-room to sit down and quaff their draughts of Cas- 
taly round Chaucer's broad, horizontal tombstone. These 
divinest poets consecrate the spot, and throw a reflected 
glory over the humblest of their companions. And as 
for the latter, it is to be hoped that they may have long 
outgrown the characteristic jealousies and morbid sensi- 
bilities of their craft, and have found out the little value 
(probably not amounting to sixpence in immortal cur- 
rency) of the posthumous renown which they once as- 
pired to win. It would be a poor compliment to a dead 
poet to fancy him leaning out of the sky and snuffing up 
the impure breath of earthly praise. 

Yet we cannot' easily rid ourselves of the notion that 
those who have bequeathed us the inheritance of an un- 



UP THE THAMES. 313 

dying song would fain be conscious of its endless reverbe- 
rations in the hearts of mankind, and would delight, 
among sublimer enjoyments, to see their names emblaz- 
oned in such a treasure-place of great memories as West- 
minster Abbey. There are some men, at all events, — 
true and tender poets, moreover, and fully deserving of 
the honor, — whose spirits, I feel certain, would linger a 
little while about Poets' Corner for the sake of witnessing 
their own apotheosis among their kindred. They have 
had a strong natural yearning, not so much for applause as 
sympathy, which the cold fortune of their lifetime did 
but scantily supply ; so that this unsatisfied appetite may 
make itself felt upon sensibilities at once so delicate and 
retentive, even a step or two beyond the grave. Leigh 
Hunt, for example, would be pleased, even now, if he 
could learn that his bust had been reposited in the midst 
of the old poets whom he admired and loved ; though 
there is hardly a man among the authors of to-day and 
yesterday whom the judgment of Englishmen would be 
less likely to place there. He deserves it, however, if 
not for his verse, (the value of which I do not estimate, 
never having been able to read it,) yet for his delightful 
prose, his unmeasured poetry, the inscrutable happiness 
of his touch, working soft miracles by a life-process like 
the growth of grass and flowers. As with all such gentle 
writers, his page sometimes betrayed a vestige of affecta- 
tion, but, the next moment, a rich, natural luxuriance 
overgrew and buried it out of sight. I knew him a little, 
and (since, Heaven be praised, few English celebrities 
whom I chanced to meet have enfranchised my pen by 
their decease, and as I assume no liberties with living 



314 UP THE THAMES. 

men) I will conclude this rambling article by sketching 
my first interview with Leigh Hunt. 

He was then at Hammersmith, occupying a very plain 
and shabby little house, in a contiguous range of others 
like it, with no prospect but that of an ugly village street, 
and certainly nothing to gratify his craving for a tasteful 
environment, inside or out. A slatternly maid-servant 
opened the door for us, and he himself stood in the entry, 
a beautiful and venerable old man, buttoned to the chin 
in a black dress-coat, tall and slender, with a countenance 
quietly alive all over, and the gentlest and most naturally 
courteous manner. He ushered us into his little study, 
or parlor, or both, — a very forlorn room, with poor paper- 
hangings and carpet, few books, no pictures that I remem- 
ber, and an awful lack of upholstery. I touch distinctly 
upon these external blemishes and this nudity of adorn- 
ment, not that they would be worth mentioning in a sketch 
of other remarkable persons, but because Leigh Hunt 
was born with such a faculty of enjoying all beautiful 
tilings that it seemed as if Fortune did him as much 
wrong in not supplying them as in withholding a suffi- 
ciency of vital breath from ordinary men. All kinds of 
mild magnificence, tempered by his taste, would have 
become him well ; but he had not the grim dignity that 
assumes nakedness as the better robe. 

I have said that he was a beautiful old man. In truth, 
I never saw a finer countenance, either as to the mould 
of features or the expression, nor any that showed the 
play of feeling so perfectly without the slightest theatrical 
emphasis. It was like a child's face in this respect. At 
my first glimpse of him, when he met us in the entry, I 
discerned that he was old, his long hair being white and 



UP THE THAMES. 315 

his wrinkles many ; it was an aged visage, in short, such 
as I had not at all expected to see, in spite of dates, be- 
cause his books talk to the reader with the tender vivacity 
of youth. But when he began to speak, and as he grew 
more earnest in conversation, I ceased to be sensible of 
his age ; sometimes, indeed, its dusky shadow darkened 
through the gleam which his sprightly thoughts diffused 
about his face, but then another flash of youth came out 
of his eyes and made an illumination again. I never 
witnessed such a wonderfully illusive transformation, be- 
fore or since ; and, to this day, trusting only to my recol- 
lection, I should find it difficult to decide which was his 
genuine and stable predicament, — youth or age. I have 
met no Englishman whose manners seemed to me so 
agreeable, soft, rather than polished, wholly unconven- 
tional, the natural growth of a kindly and sensitive dis- 
position without any reference to rule, or else obedient to 
some rule so subtile that the nicest observer could not 
detect the application of it. 

His eyes were dark and very fine, and his delightful 
voice accompanied their visible language like music. He 
appeared to be exceedingly appreciative of whatever was 
passing among those who surrounded him, and especially 
of the vicissitudes in the consciousness of the person to 
whom he happened to be addressing himself at the mo- 
ment. I felt that no effect upon my mind of what he 
uttered, no emotion, however transitory, in myself, es- 
caped his notice, though not from any positive vigilance 
on his part, but because his faculty of observation was so 
penetrative and delicate ; and to say the truth, it a little 
confused me to discern always a ripple on his mobile face, 
responsive to any slightest breeze that passed over the 



316 UP THE THAMES. 

inner reservoir of my sentiments, and seemed thence to 
extend to a similar reservoir within himself. On matters 
of feeling, and within a certain depth, you might spare 
yourself the trouble of utterance, because he already 
knew what you wanted to say, and perhaps a little more 
than you would have spoken. His figure was full of 
gentle movement, though, somehow, without disturbing 
its quietude ; and as he talked, he kept folding his hands 
nervously, and betokened in many ways a fine and imme- 
diate sensibility, quick to feel pleasure or pain, though 
scarcely caj^able, I should imagine, of a passionate expe- 
rience in either direction. There was not an English 
trait in him from head to foot, morally, intellectually, or 
physically. Beef, ale, or stout, brandy, or port-wine, en- 
tered not at all into his composition. In his earlier life, 
he appears to have given evidences of courage and sturdy 
principle, and of a tendency to fling himself into the 
rough struggle of humanity on the liberal side. It would 
be taking too much upon myself to affirm that this was 
merely a projection of his fancy world into the actual, 
and that he never could have hit a downright blow, and 
was altogether an unsuitable person to receive one. I 
beheld him not in his armor, but in his peacefullest robes. 
Nevertheless, drawing my conclusion merely from what 
I saw, it would have occurred to me that his main defi- 
ciency was a lack of grit. Though anything but a timid 
man, the combative and defensive elements were not prom- 
inently developed in his character, and could have been 
made available only when he put an unnatural force upon 
his instincts. It was on this account, and also because 
of the fineness of his nature generally, that the English 
appreciated him no better, and left this sweet and deli- 






UP THE THAMES. 3 ft 

cate poet poor, and with scanty laurels in his declining 
age. 

It was not, I think, from his American blood that Leigh 
Hunt derived either his amiability or his peaceful incli- 
nations ; at least, I do not see how we can reasonably 
claim the former quality as a national characteristic, 
though the latter might have been fairly inherited from 
his ancestors on the mother's side, w T ho were Pennsylvania 
Quakers. But the kind of excellence that distinguished 
him — his fineness, subtilty, and grace — was that which 
the richest cultivation lias heretofore tended to develop in 
the happier examples of American genius, and which 
(though I say it a little reluctantly) is perhaps what our 
future intellectual advancement may make general 
among us. His person, at all events, was thoroughly 
American, and of the best type, as were likewise his man- 
ners ; for we are the best as well as the worst mannered 
people in the world. 

Leigh Hunt loved dearly to be praised. That is to 
say, he desired sympathy as a flower seeks sunshine, and 
perhaps profited by it as much in the richer depth of 
coloring that it imparted to his ideas. In response to all 
that we ventured to express about his writings, (and, for 
my part, I went quite to the extent of my conscience, 
which was a long way, and there left the matter to a lady 
and a young girl, who happily were with me,) his face 
shone, and he manifested great delight, with a perfect, 
and yet delicate, frankness for which I loved him. He 
could not tell us, he said, the happiness that such appre- 
ciation gave him ; it always took him by surprise, he re- 
marked, for — perhaps because he cleaned his own boots, 
and performed other little ordinary offices for himself — 



318 UP THE THAMES. 

he never had been conscious of anything wonderful in his 
own person. And then he smiled, making himself and 
all the poor little parlor about him beautiful thereby. It 
is usually the hardest thing in the world to praise a man 
to his face ; but Leigh Hunt received the incense with 
such gracious satisfaction, (feeling it to be sympathy, not 
vulgar praise,) -that the only difficulty was to keep the 
enthusiasm of the moment within the limit of permanent 
opinion. A storm had suddenly come up while we were 
talking ; the rain poured, the lightning flashed, and the 
thunder broke ; but I hope, and have great pleasure in 
believing, that it was a sunny hour for Leigh Hunt. 
Nevertheless, it was not to my voice that he most favora- 
bly inclined his ear, but to those of my companions. 
Women are the fit ministers at such a shrine. 

He must have suffered keenly in his lifetime, and 
enjoyed keenly, keeping his emotions so much upon the 
surface as he seemed to do, and convenient for everybody 
to play upon. Being of a cheerful temperament, happiness 
had probably the upperhand. His was a light, mildly 
joyous nature, gentle, graceful, yet seldom attaining to 
that deepest grace which results from power ; for beauty, 
like woman, its human representative, dallies with the 
gentle, but yields its consummate favor only to the strong. 
I imagine that Leigh Hunt may have been more beautiful 
when I met him, both in person and character, than in his 
earlier days. As a young man, I could conceive of his 
being finical in certain moods, but not now, when the 
gravity of age shed a venerable grace about him. I re- 
joiced to hear him say that he was favored with most 
confident and cheering anticipations in respect to a future 
life ; and there were abundant proofs, throughout our in- 



UP THE THAMES. 319 

terview, of an unrepining spirit, resignation, quiet relin- 
quishment of the worldly benefits that were denied him, 
thankful enjoyment of whatever he had to enjoy, and 
piety, and hope shining onward into the dusk, — all of 
which gave a reverential cast to the feeling with which 
we parted from him. I wish that he could have had one 
full draught of prosperity before he died. As a matter 
of artistic propriety, it would have been delightful to see 
him inhabiting a beautiful house of his own, in an Italian 
climate, with all sorts of elaborate upholstery and minute 
elegances about him, and a succession of tender and 
lovely women to praise his sweet poetry from morning to 
night. I hardly know whether it is my fault, or the effect 
of a weakness in Leigh Hunt's character, that I should 
be sensible of a regret of this nature, when, at the same 
time, I sincerely believe that he has found an infinity of 
better things in the world whither he has gone. 

At our leave-taking, he grasped me warmly by both 
hands, and seemed as much interested in our whole party 
as if he had known us for years. All this was genuine 
feeling, a quick, luxuriant growth out of his heart, which 
was a soil for flower-seeds of rich and rare varieties, not 
acorns, but a true heart, nevertheless. Several years 
afterwards I met him for the last time at a London din- 
ner-party, looking sadly broken down by infirmities ; and 
my final recollection of the beautiful old man presents 
him arm in arm with, nay, if I mistake not, partly em- 
braced and supported by, another beloved and honored 
poet, whose minstrel-name, since he has a week-day one 
for his personal occasions, I will venture to speak. It was 
Barry Cornwall, whose kind introduction had first made 
me known to Lei«;h Hunt. 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH 
POVERTY. 

Becoming an inhabitant of a great English town, I 
often turned aside from the prosperous thoroughfares, 
(where the edifices, the shops, and the bustling crowd 
differed not so much from scenes with which I was fam- 
iliar in my own country,) and went designedly astray 
among precincts that reminded me of some of Dickens's 
grimiest pages. There I caught glimpses of a people and 
a mode of life that were comparatively new to my obser- 
vation, a sort of sombre phantasmagoric spectacle, exceed- 
ingly undelightful to behold, yet involving a singular 
interest and even fascination in its ugliness. 

Dirt, one would fancy, is plenty enough all over the 
world, being the symbolic accompaniment of the foul 
incrustation which began to settle over and bedim all 
earthly things as soon as Eve had bitten the apple ; ever 
since which hapless epoch, her daughters have chiefly 
been engaged in a desperate and unavailing struggle to 
get rid of it. But the dirt of a poverty-stricken English 
street is a monstrosity unknown on our side of the Atlan- 
tic. It reigns supreme within its own limits, and is incon- 
ceivable everywhere beyond them. We enjoy the great 
advantage, that the brightness and dryness of our atmos- 
phere keep everything clean that the sun shines upon, 
converting the larger portion of our impurities into tran- 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 321 

sitory dust which the next wind can sweep away, in con- 
trast with the damp, adhesive grime that incorporates 
itself with all surfaces (unless continually and painfully 
cleansed) in the chill moisture of the English air. Then 
the all-pervading smoke of the city, abundantly inter- 
mingled with the sable snow-flakes of bituminous coal, 
hovering overhead, descending, and alighting on pave- 
ments and rich architectural fronts, on the snowy muslin 
of the ladies, and the gentlemen's starched collars and 
shirt-bosoms, invests even the better streets in a half- 
mourning garb. It is beyond the resources of Wealth to 
keep the smut away from its premises or its own fingers' 
ends ; and as for Poverty, it surrenders itself to the dark 
influence without a struggle. Along with disastrous cir- 
cumstances, pinching need, adversity so lengthened out as 
to constitute the rule of life, there comes a certain chill 
depression of the spirits which seems especially to shudder 
at cold water. In view of so wretched a state of things, 
we accept the ancient Deluge not merely as an insulated 
phenomenon, but as a periodical necessity, and acknowl- 
edge that nothing less than such a general washing-day 
could suffice to cleanse the slovenly old world of its moral 
and material dirt. 

Gin-shops, or what the English call spirit-vaults, are 
numerous in the vicinity of these poor streets, and are set 
off with the magnificence of gilded door-posts, tarnished 
by contact with the unclean customers who haunt there. 
Ragged children come thither with old shaving-mugs, or 
broken-nosed teapots, or any such make-shift receptacle, 
to get a little poison or madness for their parents, who 
deserve no better requital at their hands for having engen- 
dered them. Inconceivably sluttish women enter at noon- 



322 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

day and stand at the counter among boon-companions of 
both sexes, stirring up misery and jollity in a bumper 
together, and quaffing off the mixture with a relish. As 
for the men, they lounge there continually, drinking till 
they are drunken, — drinking as long as they have a half- 
penny left, and then, as it seemed to me, waiting for a 
sixpenny miracle to be wrought in their pockets, so as to 
enable them to be drunken again. Most of these estab- 
lishments have a significant advertisement of "'Beds," 
doubtless for the accommodation of their customers in the 
interval between one intoxication and the next. I never 
could find it in my heart, however, utterly to condemn 
these sad revellers, and should certainly wait till I had 
some better consolation to offer before depriving them of 
their dram of gin, though death itself were in the glass ; 
for me thought their poor souls needed such fiery stimu- 
lant to lift them a little way out of the smothering squalor 
of both their outward and interior life, giving them 
glimpses and suggestions, even if bewildering ones, of 
a spiritual existence that limited their present misery. 
The temperance-reformers unquestionably derive their 
commission from the Divine Beneficence, but have never 
been taken fully into its counsels. All may not be lost, 
though those good men fail. 

Pawn-brokers' establishments, distinguished by the 
mystic symbol of the three golden balls, were conven- 
iently accessible ; though what personal property these 
wretched people could possess, capable of being estimated 
in silver or copper, so as to afford a basis for a loan, was 
a problem that still perplexes me. Old clothesmen, like- 
wise, dwelt hard by, and hung out ancient garments • to 
dangle in the wind. There were butchers' shops, too, of 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 323 

a class adapted to the neighborhood, presenting no such 
generously fattened carcasses as Englishmen love to gaze 
at in the market, no stupendous halves of mighty beeves, 
no dead hogs or muttons ornamented with carved bas- 
reliefs of fat on their ribs and shoulders, in a peculiarly 
British style of art, — not these, but bits and gobbets of 
lean meat, selvages snipt off from steaks, tough and stringy 
morsels, bare bones smitten away from joints by the 
cleaver, tripe, liver, bullocks' feet, or whatever else was 
cheapest and divisible into the smallest lots. I am afraid 
that even such delicacies came to many of their tables 
hardly oftener than Christmas. In the windows of other 
little shops you saw half a dozen wizened herrings, some 
eggs in a basket, looking so dingily antique that your 
imagination smelt them, fly-speckled biscuits, segments 
of a hungry cheese, pipes and papers of tobacco. Now 
and then a sturdy milk-woman passed by with a wooden 
yoke over her shoulders, supporting a pail on either side, 
filled with a whitish fluid, the composition of which was 
water and chalk and the milk of a sickly cow, who gave 
the best she had, poor thing ! but could scarcely make it 
rich or wholesome, spending her life in some close city- 
nook and pasturing on strange food. I have seen, once 
or twice, a donkey coming into one of these streets with 
panniers full of vegetables, and departing with a return 
cargo of what looked like rubbish and street-sweepings. 
No other commerce seemed to exist, except, possibly, a 
girl might offer you a pair of stockings or a worked collar, 
or a man whisper something mysterious about wonder- 
fully cheap cigars. And yet I remember seeing female 
hucksters in those regions, with their wares on the edge 
of the sidewalk and their own seats right in the carriage- 



324 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

way, pretending to sell half-decayed oranges and apples, 
toffy, Ormskirk cakes, combs and cheap jewelry, the 
coarsest kind of crockery, and little plates of oysters, — 
knitting patiently all day long, and removing their un- 
diminished stock in trade at nightfall. All indispensable 
importations from other quarters of the town were on a 
remarkably diminutive scale : for example, the wealthier 
inhabitants purchased their coal by the wheelbarrow-load, 
and the poorer ones by the peck-measure. It was a 
curious and melancholy spectacle, when an overladen coal- 
cart happened to pass through the street and drop a 
handful or two of its burden in the mud, to see half a 
dozen women and children scrambling for the treasure- 
trove, like a flock of hens and chickens gobbling up some 
spilt corn. In this connection I may as well mention a 
commodity of boiled snails (for such they appeared to 
me, though probably a marine production) which used to 
be peddled from door to door, piping hot, as an article of 
cheap nutriment. 

The population of these -dismal abodes appeared to 
consider the sidewalks and middle of the street as their 
common hall. In a drama of low life, the unity of place 
might be arranged rigidly according to the classic rule, 
and the street be the one locality in which every scene 
and incident should occur. Courtship, quarrels, plot and 
counterplot, conspiracies for robbery and murder, family 
difficulties or agreements, — all such matters, I doubt not, 
are constantly discussed or transacted in this sky-roofed 
saloon, so regally hung with its sombre canopy of coal- 
smoke. Whatever the disadvantages of the English 
climate, the only comfortable or wholesome part of life, 
for the city poor, must be spent in the open air. The 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 325 

stifled and squalid rooms where they lie down at night, 
whole families and neighborhoods together, or sulkily 
elbow one another in the daytime, when a settled rain 
drives them within doors, are worse horrors than it is 
worth while (without a practical object in view) to admit 
into one's imagination. No wonder that they creep forth 
from the foul mystery of their interiors, stumble down 
from their garrets, or scramble up out of their cellars, on 
the upper step of which you may see the grimy house- 
wife, before the shower is ended, letting the raindrops 
gutter down her visage ; while her children (an impish 
progeny of cavernous recesses below the common sphere 
of humanity) swarm into the daylight and attain all that 
they know of personal purification in the nearest mud- 
puddle. It might almost make a man doubt the existence 
of his own soul, to observe how Nature has flung these 
little wretches into the street and left them there, so 
evidently regarding them as nothing worth, and how all 
mankind acquiesce in the great mother's estimate of her 
offspring. For, if they are to have no immortality, what 
superior claim can I assert for mine ? And how difficult 
to believe that anything so precious as a germ of immor- 
tal growth can have been buried under this dirt-heap, 
plunged into this cesspool of misery and vice ! As often 
as I beheld the scene, it affected me with surprise and 
loathsome interest, much resembling, though in a far 
intenser degree, the feeling with which, when a boy, I 
used to turn over a plank or an old log that had long lain 
on the damp ground, and found a vivacious multitude of 
unclean and devilish-looking insects scampering to and 
fro beneath it. Without an infinite faith, there seemed 
as much prospect of a blessed futurity for those hideous 



326 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

bugs and many-footed worms as for these brethren of our 
humanity and co-heirs of all our heavenly inheritance. 
Ah, what a mystery ! Slowly, slowly, as after groping 
at the bottom of a deep, noisome, stagnant pool, my hope 
struggles upward to the surface, bearing the half-drowned 
body of a child along with it, and heaving it aloft for its 
life, and my own life, and all our lives. Unless these 
slime-clogged nostrils can be made capable of inhaling 
celestial air, I know not how the purest and most intel- 
lectual of us can reasonably expect ever to taste a breath 
of it. The whole question of eternity is staked there. 
If a single one of those helpless little ones be lost, the 
world is lost ! 

The women and children greatly preponderate in such 
places ; the men probably wandering abroad in quest of 
that daily miracle, a dinner and a drink, or perhaps slum- 
bering in the daylight that they may the better follow out 
their cat-like rambles through the dark. Here are women 
with young figures, but old, wrinkled, yellow faces, tanned 
and blear-eyed with the smoke which they cannot spare 
from their scanty fires, — it being too precious for its 
warmth to be swallowed by the chimney. Some of them 
sit oft the door-steps, nursing their unwashed babies at 
bosoms which we will glance aside from, for the sake of 
our mothers and all womanhood, because the fairest spec- 
tacle is here the foulest. Yet motherhood, in these dark 
abodes, is strangely identical with what we have all 
known it to be in the happiest homes. Nothing, as I re- 
member, smote me with more grief and pity (all the more 
poignant because perplexingly entangled with an inclina- 
tion to smile) than to hear a gaunt and ragged mother 
priding herself on the pretty ways of her ragged and 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 327 

skinny infant, just as a young matron might, when she 
invites her lady friends to admire her plump, white-robed 
darling in the nursery. Indeed, no womanly character- 
istic seemed to have altogether perished out of these poor 
souls. It was the very same creature whose tender tor- 
ments make the rapture of our young days, whom Ave 
love, cherish, and protect, and rely upon in life and death, 
and whom we delight to see beautify her beauty with rich 
robes and set it off with jewels, though now fantastically 
masquerading in a garb of tatters, wholly unfit for her to 
handle. I recognized her, over and over again, in the 
groups round a door-step or in the descent of a cellar, 
chatting with prodigious earnestness about intangible 
trifles, laughing for a little jest, sympathizing at almost 
the same instant with one neighbor's sunshine and an- 
other's shadow, wise, simple, sly, and patient, yet easily 
perturbed, and breaking into small feminine ebullitions 
of spite, wrath, and jealousy, tornadoes of a moment, 
such as vary the social atmosphere of her silken-skirted 
sisters, though smothered into propriety by dint of a well- 
bred habit. Not that there was an absolute deficiency of 
good breeding, even here. It often surprised me to wit- 
ness a courtesy and deference among these ragged folks, 
which, having seen it, I did not thoroughly believe in, 
wondering whence it should have come. I am persuaded, 
however, that there were laws of intercourse which they 
never violated, — a code of the cellar, the garret, the 
common staircase, the door-step, and the pavement, which 
perhaps had as deep a foundation in natural fitness as the 
code of the drawing-room. 

Yet again I doubt whether I may not have been utter- 
ing folly in the last two sentences, when I reflect how 



328 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

rude and rough these specimens of feminine character 
generally were. They had a readiness with their hands 
that reminded me of Molly Seagrim and other heroines 
in Fielding's novels. For example, I have seen a woman 
meet a man in the street, and, for no reason perceptible 
to me, suddenly clutch him by the hair and cuff his ears, 
— an infliction which he bore with exemplary patience, 
only snatching the very earliest opportunity to take to his 
heels. Where a sharp tongue will not serve the purpose, 
they trust to the sharpness of their finger-nails, or incar- 
nate a whole vocabulary of vituperative words in a re- 
sounding slap, or the downright blow of a doubled fist. 
All English people, I imagine, are influenced in a far 
greater degree than ourselves by this simple and honest 
tendency, in cases of disagreement, to batter one another's 
persons ; and whoever has seen a crowd of English ladies 
(for instance, at the door of the Sistine Chapel, in Holy 
Week) will be satisfied that their belligerent propensities 
are kept in abeyance only by a merciless rigor on the 
part of society. It requires a vast deal of refinement to 
spiritualize their large physical endowments. Such being 
the case with the delicate ornaments of the drawing- 
room, it is the less to be wondered at that women who 
live mostly in the open air, amid the coarsest kind of 
companionship and occupation, should carry on the inter- 
course of life with a freedom unknown to any class of 
American females, though still, I am resolved to think, 
compatible with a generous breadth of natural propriety. 
It shocked me, at first, to see them (of all ages, even 
elderly, as well as infants that could just toddle across the 
street alone) going about in the mud and mire, or through 
the dusky snow and slosh of a severe week in whiter, 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 329 

with petticoats high uplifted above bare, red feet and 
legs ; but I was comforted by observing that both shoes 
and stockings generally reappeared with better weather, 
having been thriftily kept out of the damp for the con- 
venience of dry feet within doors. Their hardihood was 
wonderful, and their strength greater than could have 
been expected from such spare diet as they probably lived 
upon. I have seen them carrying on their heads great 
burdens under which they walked as freely as if they 
were fashionable bonnets ; or sometimes the burden was 
huge enough almost to cover the whole person, looked at 
from behind, — as in Tuscan villages you may see the 
girls coming in from the country with great bundles of 
green twigs upon their backs, so that they resemble loco- 
motive masses of verdure and fragrance. But these poor 
English women seemed to be laden with rubbish, incon- 
gruous and indescribable, such as bones and rags, the 
sweepings of the house and of the street, a merchandise 
gathered up from what poverty itself had thrown away, 
a heap of filthy stuff analogous to Christian's bundle of 
sin. 

Sometimes, though very seldom, I detected a certain 
gracefulness among the younger women that was alto- 
gether new to my observation. It was a charm proper 
to the lowest class. One girl I particularly remember, in 
a garb none of the cleanest and nowise smart, and her- 
self exceedingly coarse in all respects, but yet endowed 
with a sort of witchery, a native charm, a robe of simple 
beauty and suitable behavior that she was born in and 
had never been tempted to throw off, because she had 
really nothing else to put on. Eve herself could not 
have been more natural. Nothing was affected, nothing 



330 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

imitative ; no proper grace was vulgarized by an effort 
to assume the manners or adornments of another sphere. 
This kind of beauty, arrayed in a fitness of its own, is 
probably vanishing out of the world, and will certainly 
never be found in America, where all the girls, whether 
daughters of the upper-tendom, the mediocrity, the cot- 
tage, or the kennel, aim at one standard of dress and 
deportment, seldom accomplishing a perfectly triumphant 
hit or an utterly absurd failure. Those words, " genteel " 
and " ladylike," are terrible ones and do us infinite mis- 
chief, but it is because (at least, I hope so) we are in a 
transition state, and shall emerge into a higher mode of 
simplicity than has ever been known to past ages. 

In such disastrous circumstances as I have been at- 
tempting to describe, it was beautiful to observe what a 
mysterious efficacy still asserted itself in character. A 
woman, evidently poor as the poorest of her neighbors, 
would be knitting or sewing on the door-step, just as fifty 
other women were ; but round about her skirts (though 
wofully patched) you would be sensible of a certain sphere 
of decency, which, it seemed to me, could not have been 
kept more impregnable in the cosiest little sitting-room, 
where the tea-kettle on the hob was humming its good 
old song of domestic peace. Maidenhood had a similar 
power. The evil habit that grows upon us in this harsh 
world makes me faithless to my own better perceptions ; 
and yet I have seen girls in these wretched streets, on 
whose virgin purity, judging merely from their impression 
on my instincts as they passed by, I should have deemed 
it safe, at the moment, to stake my life. The next mo- 
ment, however, as the surrounding flood of moral unclean- 
ness surged over their footsteps, I would not have staked a 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 331 

spike of thistle-down on the same wager. Yet the miracle 
was within the scope of Providence, which is equally wise 
and equally beneficent, (even to those poor girls, though I 
acknowledge the fact without the remotest comprehension 
of the mode of it,) whether they were pure or what we 
fellow-sinners call vile. Unless your faith be deep-rooted 
and of most vigorous growth, it is the safer way not to 
turn aside into this region so suggestive of miserable 
doubt. It was a place " with dreadful faces thronged," 
wrinkled and grim with vice and wretchedness ; and, 
thinking over the line of Milton here quoted, I come to 
the conclusion that those ugly lineaments which startled 
Adam and Eve, as they looked backward to the closed 
gate of Paradise, were no fiends from the pit, but the 
more terrible foreshadowings of what so many of their 
descendants were* to be. God help them, and us likewise, 
their brethren and sisters ! Let me add, that, forlorn, 
ragged, care-worn, hopeless, dirty, haggard, hungry, as 
they were, the most pitiful thing of all was to see the 
sort of patience with which they accepted their lot, as if 
they had been born into the world for that and nothing 
else. Even the little children had this characteristic in 
as perfect development as their grandmothers. 

The children, in truth, were the ill-omened blossoms 
from which another harvest of precisely such dark fruitage 
as I saw ripened around me was to be produced. Of course, 
you would imagine these to be lumps of crude iniquity, 
tiny vessels as full as they could hold of naughtiness ; 
nor can I say a great deal to the contrary. Small proof 
of parental discipline could I discern, save when a mother 
(drunken, I sincerely hope) snatched her own imp out of 
a group of pale, half-naked, humor-eaten abortions that 



332 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

were playing and squabbling together in the mud, turned 
up its tatters, brought down her heavy hand on its poor 
little tenderest part, and let it go again with a shake. If 
the child knew what the punishment was for, it was wiser 
than I pretend to be. It yelled, and went back to its 
playmates in the mud. Yet let me bear testimony to 
what was beautiful, and more touching than anything that 
I ever witnessed in the intercourse of happier children. I 
allude' to the superintendence which some of these small 
people (too small, one would think, to be sent into the street 
alone, had there been any other nursury for them) exer- 
cised over still smaller ones. Whence they derived such 
a sense of duty, unless immediately from God, I cannot 
tell ; but it was wonderful to observe the expression of 
responsibility in their deportment, the anxious fidelity 
with which they discharged their unfit office, the tender 
patience with which they linked their less pliable impulses 
to the wayward footsteps of an infant, and let it guide 
them whithersoever it liked. In the hollow-cheeked, 
large-eyed girl of ten, whom I saw giving a cheerless 
oversight to her baby-brother, I did not so much marvel 
at it. She had merely come a little earlier than usual to 
the perception of what was to be her business in life. 
But I admired the sickly-looking little boy, who did vio- 
lence to his boyish nature by making himself the servant 
of his little sister, — she too small to walk, and he too 
small to take her in his arms, — and therefore working a 
kind of miracle to transport her from one dirt-heap to an- 
other. Beholding such works of love and duty, I took 
heart again, and deemed it not so impossible, after all, for 
these neglected children to find a path through the squalor 
and evil of their circumstances up to the gate of heaven. 






OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 333 

Perhaps there was this latent good in all of them, though 
generally they looked brutish, and dull even in their 
sports; there was little mirth among them, nor even a 
fully awakened spirit of blackguardism. Yet sometimes, 
again, 1 saw, with surprise and a sense as if I had been 
asleep and dreaming, the bright, intelligent, merry face 
of a child whose dark eyes gleamed with vivacious ex-, 
pression through the dirt that incrusted its skin, like sun- 
shine struggling through a very dusty window-pane. 

In these streets the belted and blue-coated policeman 
appears seldom in comparison with the frequency of 
his occurrence in more reputable thoroughfares. I used 
to think that the inhabitants would have ample time to 
murder one another, or any stranger, like myself, who 
might violate the filthy sanctities of the place, before the 
law could bring up its lumbering assistance. Neverthe- 
less, there is a supervision ; nor does the watchfulness of 
authority permit the populace to be tempted to any out- 
break. Once, in a time of dearth, I noticed a ballad- 
sin ire r going through the street hoarsely chanting some 
discordant strain in a provincial dialect, of which I could 
only make out that it addressed the sensibilities of the 
auditors on the score of starvation ; but by his side 
stalked the policeman, offering no interference, but watch- 
ful to hear what this rough minstrel said or sang, and 
silence him, if his effusion threatened to prove too soul- 
stirring. In my judgment, however, there is little or no 
danger of that kind : they starve patiently, sicken pa- 
tiently, die patiently, not through resignation, but a dis- 
eased flaccidity of hope. If ever they should do mischief 
to those above them, it will probably be by the communi- 
cation of some destructive pestilence ; for, so the medical 



334 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

men affirm, they suffer all the ordinary diseases with a 
degree of virulence elsewhere unknown, and keep among 
themselves traditionary plagues that have long ceased to 
afflict more fortunate societies. Charity herself gathers 
her robe about her to avoid their contact. It would be a 
dire revenge, indeed, if they were to prove their claims 
to be reckoned of one blood and nature with the noblest 
and wealthiest by compelling them to inhale death through 
the diffusion of their own poverty-poisoned atmosphere. 

A true Englishman is a kind man at heart, but has an 
unconquerable dislike to poverty and beggary. Beggars 
have heretofore been so strange to an American that he 
is apt to become their prey, being recognized through his 
national peculiarities, and beset by them in the streets. 
The English smile at him, and say that there are ample 
public arrangements for every pauper's possible need, 
that street charity promotes idleness and vice, and that 
yonder personification of misery on the pavement will 
lay up a good day's profit, besides supping more luxuri- 
ously than the dupe who gives him a shilling. By and 
by the stranger adopts their theory and begins to prac- 
tise upon it, much to his own temporary freedom from 
annoyance, but not entirely without moral detriment or 
sometimes a too late contrition. Years afterwards, it 
may be, his memory is still haunted by some vindictive 
wretch whose cheeks were pale and hunger-pinched, 
whose rags fluttered in the east wind, whose right arm 
was paralyzed and his left leg shrivelled into a mere 
nerveless stick, but whom he passed by remorselessly be- 
cause an Englishman chose to say that the fellow's misery 
looked too perfect, was too artistically got up, to be gen- 
uine. / Even allowing this to be true, (as, a hundred 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 335 

chances to one, it was,) it would still have been a clear 
case of economy to buy him off with a little loose silver, 
so that his lamentable figure should not limp at the heels 
of your conscience all over the world. To own the truth, 
I provided myself with several such imaginary persecu- 
tors in England, and recruited their number with at least 
one sickly -looking wretch whose acquaintance I first made 
at Assisi, in Italy, and, taking a dislike to something sin- 
ister in his aspect, permitted him to beg early and late, 
and all day long, without getting a single baiocco. At 
my latest glimpse of hjm, the villain avenged himself, 
not by a volley of horrible curses, as any other Italian 
beggar would, but by taking an expression so grief- 
stricken, want-wrung, hopeless, and withal resigned, that 
I could paint his life-like portrait at this moment. Were 
I to go over the same ground again, I would listen to no 
man's theories, but buy the little luxury of beneficence 
at a cheap rate, instead of doing myself a moral mischief 
by exuding a stony incrustation over whatever natural 
sensibility I might possess. 

On the other hand, there were some mendicants whose 
utmost efforts I even now r felicitate myself on having 
withstood. Such was a phenomenon abridged of his 
lower half, who beset me for two or three years together, 
and, in spite of his deficiency of locomotive members, 
had some supernatural method of transporting himself 
(simultaneously, I believe) to all quarters of the city. 
He wore a sailor's jacket, (possibly, because skirts would 
have been a superfluity to his figure,) and had a remark- 
ably broad-shouldered and muscular frame, surmounted 
by a large, fresh-colored lace, which was full of power 
and intelligence. His dress and linen were the perfec- 



336 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

tion of neatness. Once a day, at least, wherever I went, 
I suddenly became aware of this trunk of a man on the 
path before me, resting on his base, and looking as if he 
had just sprouted out of the pavement, and would sink 
into it again and reappear at some other spot the instant 
you left him behind. The expression of his eye was 
perfectly respectful, but terribly fixed, holding your own 
as by fascination, never once winking, never wavering 
from its point-blank gaze right into your face, till you 
were completely beyond the range of his battery of one 
immense rifled cannon. This was his mode of soliciting 
alms ; and he reminded me of the old beggar who ap- 
pealed so touchingly to the charitable sympathies of Gil 
Bias, taking aim at him from the roadside with a long- 
barrelled musket. The intentness and directness of his 
silent appeal, his close and unrelenting attack upon your 
individuality, respectful as it seemed, was the very flower 
of insolence ; or, if you give it a possibly truer interpre- 
tation, it was the tyrannical effort of a man endowed 
with great natural force of character to constrain your 
reluctant will to his purpose. Apparently, he had staked 
his salvation upon the ultimate success of a daily strug- 
gle between himself and me, the triumph of which would 
compel me to become a tributary to the hat that lay on 
the pavement beside him. Man or fiend, however, there 
was a stubbornness in his intended victim which this mas- 
sive fragment of a mighty personality had not altogether 
reckoned upon, and by its aid I was enabled to pass him 
at my customary pace hundreds of times over, quietly 
meeting his terribly respectful eye, and allowing him the 
fair chance which I felt to be his due, to subjugate me, if 
he reallv had the strength for it. He never succeeded, 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 337 

but, on the other hand, never gave up the contest ; and 
should I ever walk those streets again, I am certain that 
the truncated tyrant will sprout up through the pave- 
ment and look me fixedly in the eye, and perhaps get the 
victoiy. 

I should think all the more highly of myself, if I had 
shown equal heroism in resisting another class of beg- 
garly depredators, who assailed me on my weaker side 
and won an easy spoil. Such was the sanctimonious 
clergyman, with his white cravat, who visited me with a 
subscription-paper, which he himself had drawn up, in a 
case of heart-rending distress ; — the respectable and 
ruined tradesman, going from door to door, shy and silent 
in his own person, but accompanied by a sympathizing 
friend, who bore testimony to his integrity, and stated the 
unavoidable misfortunes that had crushed him down ; — 
or the delicate and prettily dressed lady, who had been 
bred in affluence, but was suddenly thrown upon the 
perilous charities of the world by the death of an indul- 
gent, but secretly insolvent father, or the commercial 
catastrophe and simultaneous suicide of the best of hus- 
bands ; — or the gifted, but unsuccessful author, appeal- 
ing to my fraternal sympathies, generously rejoicing in 
some small prosperities which he was kind enough to 
term my own triumphs in the field of letters, and claim- 
ing to have largely contributed to them by his unbought 
notices in the public journals. England is full of such 
people, and a hundred other varieties of peripatetic trick- 
sters, higher than these, and lower, who act their parts 
tolerably well, but seldom with an absolutely illusive 
effect. I knew at once, raw Yankee as 1 was, that they 
wen- humbugs, almost without an exception, — rats that 



338 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

nibble at the honest bread and cheese of the community, 
and grow fat by their petty pilferings, — yet often gave 
them what they asked, and privately owned myself a 
simpleton. There is a decorum which restrains you (un- 
less you happen to be a police-constable) from breaking 
through a crust of plausible respectability, even when 
you are certain that there is a knave beneath it. 

After making myself as familiar as I decently could 
with the poor streets, I became curious to see what kind 
of a home was provided for the inhabitants at the public 
expense, fearing that it must needs be a most comfortless 
one, or else their choice (if choice it were) of so miser- 
able a life outside was truly difficult to account for. Ac- 
cordingly, I visited a great almshouse, and was glad to 
observe how unexceptionably all the parts of the establish- 
ment were carried on, and what an orderly life, full-fed, 
sufficiently reposeful, and undisturbed by the arbitrary 
exercise of authority, seemed to be led there. Possibly, 
indeed, it was that very orderliness, and the cruel neces- 
sity of being neat and clean, and even the comfort result- 
ing from these and other Christian-like restraints and 
regulations, that constituted the jmncipal grievance on 
the part of the poor, shiftless inmates, accustomed to 
a life-long luxury of dirt and harum-scarumness. The 
wild life of the streets has perhaps as unforgetable a 
charm, to those who have once thoroughly imbibed it, as 
the life of the forest or the prairie. But I conceive 
rather that there must be insuperable difficulties, for the 
majority of the poor, in the wa^ of getting admittance to 
the almshouse, than that a merely aesthetic preference 
for the street would incline the pauper-class to fare 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 339 

scantily and precariously, and expose their raggedness 
to the rain and snow, when such a hospitable door stood 
wide open for their entrance. It might be that the rough- 
est and darkest side of the matter was not shown me, 
there being persons of eminent station and of both sexes 
in the party which I accompanied ; and, of course, a 
properly trained public functionary would have deemed 
it a monstrous rudeness, as well as a great shame, to ex- 
hibit anything to people of rank that might too painfully 
shock their sensibilities. 

The women's ward was the portion of the establish- 
ment which we especially examined. It could not be 
questioned that they were treated with kindness as well 
as care. No doubt, as has been already suggested, some 
of them felt the irksomeness of submission to general 
rules of orderly behavior, after being accustomed to that 
perfect freedom from the minor proprieties, at least, which 
is one of the compensations of absolutely hopeless pov- 
erty, or of any circumstances that set us fairly below the 
decencies of life. I asked the governor of the house 
whether he met with any difficulty in keeping peace and 
order among his inmates ; and he informed me that his 
troubles among the women were incomparably greater 
than with the men. They were freakish, and apt to be 
quarrelsome, inclined to plague an^l pester one another 
in ways that it was impossible to lay hold of, and to 
thwart his own authority by the like intangible methods. 
He said this with the utmost good-nature, and quite won 
my regard by so placidly resigning himself to the in- 
evitable necessity of letting the women throw dust into 
his eyes. They certainly looked peaceable and sisterly 
enough, as I saw them, though still it might be faintly 



340 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

perceptible that some of them were consciously playing 
their parts before the governor and his distinguished 
visitors. 

This governor seemed to me a man thoroughly fit for 
his position. An American, in an office of similar re- 
sponsibility, would doubtless be a much superior person, 
better educated, possessing a far wider range of thought, 
more naturally acute, with a quicker tact of external ob- 
servation and a readier faculty of dealing with difficult 
cases. The women would not succeed in throwing half 
so much dust into his eyes. Moreover, his black coat, 
and thin, sallow visage, would make him look like a 
scholar, and his manners would indefinitely approximate 
to those of a gentleman. But I cannot help question- 
ing, whether, on the whole, these higher endowments 
would produce decidedly better results. The English- 
man was thoroughly plebeian both in aspect and be- 
havior, a bluff, ruddy-faced, hearty, kindly, yeoman-like 
personage, with no refinement whatever, nor any super- 
fluous sensibility, but gifted with a native wholesomeness 
of character which must have been a very beneficial 
element in the atmosphere of the almshouse. He spoke 
to his pauper family in loud, good-humored, cheerful 
tones, and treated them with a healthy freedom that 
probably caused the.forlorn wretches to feel as if they 
were free and healthy likewise. If he had understood 
them a little better, he would not have treated them half 
so wisely. We are apt to make sickly people more mor- 
bid, and unfortunate people more miserable, by endeavor- 
ing to adapt our deportment to their especial and indi- 
vidual needs. They eagerly accept our well-meant 
efforts; but it is like returning their own sick breath 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OE ENGLISH POVERTY. 341 

>ack upon themselves, to be breathed over and over 
kgain, intensifying the inward mischief at every repe- 
ition. The sympathy that would really do them good 
s of a kind that recognizes their sound and healthy 
>arts, and ignores the part affected by disease, which will 
hrive under the eye of a too close observer like a poison- 
»us weed in the sunshine. My good friend the governor 
lad no tendencies in the latter direction, and abundance 
>f them in the former, and was consequently as whole- 
lome and invigorating as the west wind with a little 
rpice of the north in it, brightening the dreary visages 
hat encountered us as if he had carried a sunbeam in 
lis hand. He expressed himself by his whole being and 
personality, and by works more than words, and had the 
lot unusual English merit of knowing what to do much 
jetter than how to talk about it. 

The women, I imagine, must have felt one iinperfec- 
:ion in their state, however comfortable otherwise. They 
tvere forbidden, or, at all events, lacked the means, to 
follow out their natural instinct of adorning themselves ; 
ill were dressed in one homely uniform of blue-checked 
gowns, with such caps upon their heads as English ser- 
vants wear. Generally, too, they had one dowdy Eng- 
lish aspect, and a vulgar type of features, so nearly alike 
that they seemed literally to constitute a sisterhood. 
We have few of these absolutely unilluminated faces 
among our native American population, individuals of 
whom must be singularly unfortunate, if, mixing as we 
do, no drop of gentle blood has contributed to refine the 
turbid element, no gleam of hereditary intelligence has 
lighted up the stolid eyes, which their forefathers brought 
from the Old Country. Even in this English almshouse, 



342 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

however, there was at least one person who claimed to be 
intimately connected with rank and wealth. The gov- 
ernor, after suggesting that this person would probably be 
gratified by our visit, ushered us into a small parlor, 
which was furnished a little more like a room in a private 
dwelling than others that we entered, and had a row of 
religious books and fashionable novels on the mantel- 
piece. An old lady sat at a bright coal fire, reading a 
romance, and rose to receive us with a certain pomp of 
manner and elaborate display of ceremonious courtesy, 
which, in spite of myself, made me inwardly question the 
genuineness of her aristocratic pretensions. But, at any 
rate, she looked like a respectable old soul, and was evi- 
dently gladdened to the very core of her frost-bitten 
heart by the awful punctiliousness with which we re- 
sponded to her gracious and hospitable, though unfa- 
miliar welcome. After a little polite conversation, we 
retired ; and the governor, with a lowered voice and an 
air of deference, told us that she had been a lady of 
quality, and had ridden in her own equipage, not many 
years before, and now lived in continual expectation that 
some of her rich relatives would drive up in their car- 
riages to take her away. Meanwhile, he added, she was 
treated with great respect by her fellow-paupers. I could 
not help thinking, from a few criticisable peculiarities in 
her talk and manner, that there might have been a mis- 
take on the governor's part, and perhaps a venial exag- 
geration on the old lady's, concerning her former position 
in society ; but what struck me was the forcible instance 
of that most prevalent of English vanities, the preten- 
sion to aristocratic connection, on one side, and the sub- 
mission and reverence with which it was accepted by the 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 343 

governor and his household, on the other. Among our- 
selves, I think, when wealth and eminent position have 
taken their departure, they seldom leave a pallid ghosl 
behind them, — or, if it sometimes stalks abroad, few 
recognize it. 

We went into several other rooms, at the doors of 
which, pausing on the outside, we could hear the volu- 
bility, and sometimes the wrangling, of the female in- 
habitants within, but invariably found silence and peace 
when we stepped over the threshold. The women were 
grouped together in their sitting-rooms, sometimes three 
or four, sometimes a larger number, classified by their 
spontaneous affinities, I suppose, and all busied, so far as 
I can remember, with the one occupation of knitting coarse 
yarn stockings. Hardly any of them, I am sorry to say, 
had a brisk or cheerful air, though it often stirred them 
up to a momentary vivacity to be accosted by the gover- 
nor, and they seemed to like being noticed, however 
slightly, by the visitors. The happiest person whom I 
saw there (and, running hastily through my experiences, 
I hardly recollect to have seen a happier one in my life, 
if you take a careless flow of spirits as happiness) Avas 
an old woman that lay in bed among ten or twelve heavy- 
looking females, who plied their knitting-work round 
about her. She laughed, when we entered, and imme- 
diately began to talk to us, in a thin, little, spirited 
quaver, claiming to be more than a century old ; and the 
governor (in whatever way he happened to be cognizant 
of the fact) confirmed her age to be a hundred and four. 
Her jauntiness and cackling merriment were really won- 
derful. It was as if she had got through with all her 
actual business in life two or three generations ago, and 



344 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

now, freed from every responsibility for herself or others, 
had only to keep up a mirthful state of mind till the short 
time, or long time, (and, happy as she was, she appeared 
not to care whether it were long or short,) before Death, 
who had misplaced her name in his list, might remember 
to take her away. She had gone quite round the circle 
of human existence, and come back to the play-ground 
again. And so she had grown to be a kind of miraculous 
old pet, the plaything of people seventy or eighty years 
younger than herself, who talked and laughed with her 
as if she were a child, finding great delight in her way- 
ward and strangely playful responses, into some of which 
she cunningly conveyed a gibe that caused their ears to 
tingle a little. She had done getting out of bed in this 
world, and lay there to be waited upon like a queen or a 
baby. 

In the same room sat a pauper who had once been an 
actress of considerable repute, but was compelled to give 
up her profession by a softening of the brain. The dis- 
ease seemed to have stolen the continuity out of her 
life, and disturbed all healthy relationship between the 
thoughts within her and the world without. On our first 
entrance, she looked cheerfully at us, and showed herself 
ready to engage in conversation ; but suddenly, while Ave 
were talking with the century-old crone, the poor actress 
began to weep, contorting her face with extravagant 
stage-grimaces, and wringing her hands for some inscru- 
table sorrow. It might have been a reminiscence of . 
actual calamity in her past life, or, quite as probably, it 
was but a dramatic woe, beneath which she had stag- 
gered and shrieked and wrung her hands with hundreds 
of repetitions in the sight of crowded theatres, and been 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 345 

as often comforted by thunders of applause. But my 
idea of the mystery was, that she had a sense of wrong 
in seeing the aged woman (whose empty vivacity was 
like the rattling of dry peas in a bladder) chosen as the 
central object of interest to the visitors, while she her- 
self, who had agitated thousands of hearts with a breath. 
sat starving for the admiration that was her natural food. 
I appeal to the whole society of artists of the Beautiful 
and the Imaginative, — poets, romancers, painters, sculp- 
tors, actors, — whether or no this is a grief that may be 
felt even amid the torpor of a dissolving brain ! 

We looked into a good many sleeping -chambers, 
where were rows of beds, mostly calculated for two oc- 
cupants, and provided with sheets and pillow-cases that 
resembled sackcloth. It appeared to me that the sense 
of beauty was insufficiently regarded in all the arrange- 
ments of the almshouse ; a little cheap luxury for the 
eye, at least, might do the poor folks a substantial good. 
But, at all events, there was the beauty of perfect neat- 
ness and orderliness, which, being heretofore known to 
few of them, was perhaps as much as they could well 
digest in the remnant of their lives. We were invited 
into the laundry, where a great washing and drying were 
in process, the whole atmosphere being hot and vaporous 
with the steam of wet garments and bedclothes. This 
atmosphere was the pauper-life of the past week or fort- 
night resolved into a gaseous state, and breathing it, how- 
ever fastidiously, we were forced to inhale the strange 
element into our inmost being. Had the Queen been 
there, I know not how she could have escaped the neces- 
sity. What an intimate brotherhood is this in which we 
dwell, do what we may to put an artificial remoteness 



346 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

between the high creature and the low one ! A poor 
man's breath, borne on the vehicle of tobacco-smoke, 
floats into a palace-window and reaches the nostrils of a 
monarch. It is but an example, obvious to the sense, of 
the innumerable and secret channels by which, at every 
moment of our lives, the flow and reflux of a common 
humanity pervade us all. How superficial are the nice- 
ties of such as pretend to keep aloof! Let the whole 
world be cleansed, or not a man or woman of us all can 
be clean. 

By and by we came to the ward where the children 
were kept, on entering which, we saw, in the first place, 
several unlovely and unwholesome little people lazily 
playing together in a courtyard. And here a singular 
incommodity befell one member of our party. Among 
the children was a wretched, pale, half-torpid little thing, 
(about six years old, perhaps, but I know not whether a 
girl or a boy,) with a humor in its eyes and face, which 
the governor said was the scurvy, and which appeared to 
bedim its powers of vision, so that it toddled about grop- 
ingly, as if in quest of it did not precisely know what. 
This child — this sickly, wretched, humor-eaten infant, the 
offspring of unspeakable sin and sorrow, whom it must 
have required several generations of guilty progenitors to 
render so pitiable an object as we beheld it — imme- 
diately took an unaccountable fancy to the gentleman 
just hinted at. It prowled about him like a pet kitten, I 
rubbing against his legs, following everywhere at his 
heels, pulling at his coat-tails, and, at last, exerting all 
the speed that its poor limbs were capable of, got directly 
before him and held forth its arms, mutely insisting on 
being taken up. It said not a word, being perhaps under- 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 347 

witted and incapable of prattle. But it smiled up in his 
face, — a sort of woful gleam was that smile, through the 
sickly blotches that covered its features, — and found 
means to express such a perfect confidence that it was 
going to be fondled and made much of, that there was no 
possibility in a human heart of balking its expectation. 
It was as if God had promised the poor child this favor 
on behalf of that individual, and he was bound to fulfil 
the contract, or else no longer call himself a man among 
men. Nevertheless, it could be no easy thing for him to 
do, he being a person burdened with more than an Eng- 
lishman's customary reserve, shy of actual contact with 
human beings, afflicted with a peculiar distaste for what- 
ever was ugly, and, furthermore, accustomed to that habit 
of observation from an insulated stand-point which is said 
(but, I hope, erroneously) to have the tendency of put- 
ting ice into the blood. 

So I watched the struggle in his mind with a good deal 
of interest, and am seriously of opinion that he did an 
heroic act, and effected more than he dreamed of towards 
his final salvation, when he took up the loathsome child 
and caressed it as tenderly as if he had been its father. 
To be sure, we all smiled at him, at the time, but doubt- 
less would have acted pretty much the same in a similar 
stress of circumstances. The child, at any rate, appeared 
to be satisfied with his behavior ; for when he had held it 
a considerable time, and set it down, it still favored him 
with its company, keeping fast hold of his forefinger till 
we reached the confines of the place. And on our return 
through the courtyard, after visiting another part of the 
establishment, here again was this same little Wretched- 
ness waiting for its victim, with a smile of joyful, and yet 



348 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

dull recognition about its scabby mouth and in its rheumy 
eyes. No doubt, the child's mission in reference to our 
friend was to remind him that he was responsible, in his 
degree, for all the sufferings and misdemeanors of the 
world in which he lived, and was not entitled to look 
upon a particle of its dark calamity as if it were none of 
his concern : the offspring of a brother's iniquity being 
his own blood-relation, and the guilt, likewise, a burden 
on him, unless he expiated it by better deeds. 

All the children in this ward seemed to be invalids, 
and, going up-stairs, we found more of them in the same 
or a worse condition than the little creature just described, 
with their mothers (or more probably other women, for 
the infants were mostly foundlings) in attendance as 
nurses. The matron of the ward, a middle-aged woman, 
remarkably kind and motherly in aspect, was walking to 
and fro across the chamber — on that weary journey in 
which careful mothers and nurses travel so continually 
and so far, and gain never a step of progress — with an 
unquiet baby in her arms. She assured us that she en- 
joyed her occupation, being exceedingly fond of children ; 
and, in fact, the absence of timidity in all the little peo- 
ple was a sufficient proof that they could have had no 
experience of harsh treatment, though, on the other 
hand, none of them appeared to be attracted to one in- 
dividual more than another. In this point they differed 
widely from the poor child below-stairs. They seemed 
to recognize a universal motherhood in womankind, and 
cared not which individual might be the mother of the 
moment. I found their tameness as shocking as did 
Alexander Selkirk that of the brute subjects of his else 
solitary kingdom. It was a sort of tame familiarity, a 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 349 

perfect indifference to the approach of strangers, such as 
I never noticed in other children. I accounted for it 
partly by their nerveless,' unstrung state of body, incapa- 
ble of the quick thrills of delight and fear which play 
upon the lively harp-strings of a healthy child's nature, 
and partly by their woful lack of acquaintance with a 
private home, and their being therefore destitute of the 
sweet homebred shyness, which is like the sanctity of 
heaven about a mother-petted child. Their condition 
was like that of clrickens hatched in an oven, and grow- 
ing up -without the especial guardianship of a matron- 
hen : both the chicken and the child, methinks, must 
needs want something that is essential to their respec- 
tive characters. 

In this chamber (which was spacious, containing a 
large number of beds) there was a clear fire burning on 
the hearth, as in all the other occupied rooms ; and 
directly in front of the blaze sat a woman holding a 
baby, which, beyond all reach of comparison, was the 
most horrible object that ever afflicted my sight. Days 
afterwards — nay, even now, when I bring it up vividly 
before my mind's eye — it seemed to lie upon the floor 
of my heart, polluting my moral being with the sense of 
something grievously amiss in the entire conditions of hu- 
manity. The holiest man could not be otherwise than 
full of wickedness, the chastest virgin seemed impure, in 
a world where such a babe was possible. The governor 
whispered me. apart, that, like nearly all the rest of them, 
it was the child of unhealthy parents. Ah, yes ! There 
was the mischief. This spectral infant, a hideous mock- 
ery of the visible link which Love creates between man 
and woman, was born of disease and sin. Diseased Sin 



350 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

was its father, and Sinful Disease its mother, and their off- 
spring lay in the woman's arms like a nursing Pestilence, 
which, could it live and grow up, would make the world 
a more accursed abode than ever heretofore. Thank 
Heaven, it could not live ! This baby, if we must give 
it that sweet name, seemed to be three or four months 
old, but, being such an unthrifty changeling, might have 
been considerably older. It was all covered with blotches, 
and preternaturally dark and discolored ; it was withered 
away, quite shrunken and fleshless ; it breathed only 
amid pantings and gaspings, and moaned painfully at 
every gasp. The only comfort in reference to it was the 
evident impossibility of its surviving to draw many more 
of those miserable, moaning breaths j and it would have 
been infinitely less heart-depressing to see it die, right 
before my eyes, than to depart and carry it alive in my 
remembrance, still suffering the incalculable torture of 
its little life. I can by no means express how horrible 
this infant was, neither ought I to attempt it. And yet 
I must add one final touch. Young as the poor little 
creature was, its pain and misery had endowed it with 
a premature intelligence, insomuch that its eyes seemed 
to stare at the by-standers out of their sunken sockets 
knowingly and appealingly, as if summoning us one and 
all to witness the deadly wrong of its existence. At least, 
I so interpreted its look, when it positively met and re- 
sponded to my own awe-stricken gaze, and therefore I lay 
the case, as far as I am able, before mankind, on whom 
God has imposed the necessity to suffer in soul and body 
till this dark and dreadful wrong be righted. 

Thence we went to the school-rooms, which were un- 
derneath the chapel. The pupils, like the children whom 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 351 

we had just seen, were, in large proportion, foundlings. 
Almost without exception, they looked sickly, with marks 
of eruptive trouble in their doltish faces, and a general 
tendency to diseases of the eye. Moreover, the poor 
little wretches appeared to be uneasy within their skins, 
and screwed themselves about on the benches in a dis- 
agreeably suggestive way, as if they had inherited the 
evil habits of their parents as an innermost garment of 
the same texture and material as the shirt of Nessus, 
and must wear it with unspeakable discomfort as long as 
they lived. I saw only a single child that looked healthy ; 
and on my pointing him out, the governor informed me 
that this little boy, the sole exception to the miserable 
aspect of his school-fellows, was not a foundling, nor 
properly a work-house child, being born of respectable 
parentage, and his father one of the officers of the insti- 
tution. As for the remainder, — the hundred pale abor- 
tions to be counted against one rosy-cheeked boy, — what 
shall we say or do ? Depressed by the sight of so much 
misery, and uninventive of remedies for the evils that 
force themselves on my perception, I can do little more 
than recur to the idea already hinted at in the early pari 
of this article, regarding the speedy necessity of a new 
deluge. So far as these children are concerned, at any 
rate, it would be a blessing to the human race, which 
they will contribute to enervate and corrupt, — a greater 
blessing to themselves, who inherit no patrimony but dis- 
ease and vice, and in whose souls if there be a spark of 
God's life, this seems the only possible mode of keeping 
it aglow, — if every one of them could be drowned to- 
night, by their best friends, instead of being put tenderly 
to bed. This heroic method of treating human maladies, 



352 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

moral and material, is certainly beyond the scope of man's 
discretionary rights, and probably will not be adopted by 
Divine Providence until the opportunity of milder refor- 
mation shall have been offered us, again and again, 
through a series of future ages. 

It may be fair to acknowledge that the humane and 
excellent governor, as well as other persons better ac- 
quainted with the subject than myself, took a less gloomy 
view of it, though still so dark a one as to involve scanty 
consolation. They remarked that individuals of the male 
sex, picked up in the streets and nurtured in the work- 
house, sometimes succeed tolerably well in life, because 
they are taught trades before being turned into the world, 
and, by dint of immaculate behavior and good luck, are 
not unlikely to get employment and earn a livelihood. 
The case is different with the girls. They $an only go 
to service, and are invariably rejected by families of re- 
sj)ectability on account of their origin, and for the better 
reason of their unfitness to fill satisfactorily even the 
meanest situations in a well-ordered English household. 
Their resource is to take service with people only a step 
or two above the poorest class, with whom they fare 
scantily, endure harsh treatment, lead shifting and pre- 
carious lives, and finally drop into the slough of evil, 
through which, in their best estate, they do but pick their 
slimy way on stepping-stones. 

From the schools we went to the bake-house, and the 
brew-house, (for such cruelty is not harbored in the heart 
of a true Englishman as to deny a pauper his daily allow- 
ance of beer,) and through the kitchens, where we be- 
held an immense pot over the fire, surging and walloping 
with some kind of a savory stew that filled it up to its 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 353 

brim. We also visited a tailor's shop, and a shoemaker's 
shop, in both of which a nrtmber of men, and pale, dimin- 
utive apprentices, Avere at work, diligently enough, though 
seemingly with small heart in the business. Finally, the 
governor ushered us into a shed, inside of which was piled 
up an immense quantity of new coffins. They were of the 
plainest description, made of pine boards, probably of 
American growth, not very nicely smoothed by the plane, 
neither painted nor stained with black, but provided with 
a loop of rope at either end for the convenience of lifting 
the rude box and its inmate into the cart that shall carry 
them to the burial-ground. There, in holes ten feet deep, 
the paupers are buried one above another, mingling their 
relics indistingnishably. In another world may they re- 
sume their individuality, and find it a happier one than 
here! 

As we departed, a character came under our notice 
which I have met with in all almshouses, whether of the 
city or village, or in England or America. It was the 
familiar simpleton, who shuffled across the courtyard", 
clattering his wooden-soled shoes, to greet us with a howl 
or a laugh, I hardly know which, holding out his hand 
for a penny, and chuckling grossly when it was given 
him. All underwitted persons, so far as my experience 
goes, have this craving for copper coin, and appear to 
estimate its value by a miraculous instinct, which is one 
of the earliest gleams of human intelligence while the 
nobler faculties are yet in abeyance. There may come a 
time, even in this world, when we shall all understand 
that our tendency to the individual appropriation of gold 
and broad acres, fine houses, and such good and beautiful 
things as are equally enjoyable by a multitude, is but a 
2 J 



354 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

trait of imperfectly developed intelligence, like the sim- 
pleton's cupidity of a penny. When that day dawns, — 
and probably not till then, — I imagine that there will 
be no more poor streets nor need of almshouses. 

I was once present at the wedding of some poor Eng- 
lish people, and was deeply impressed by the spectacle, 
though by no means with such proud and delightful emo- 
tions as seem to have affected all England on the recent 
occasion of the marriage of its Prince. It was in the 
Cathedral at Manchester, a particularly black and grim 
old structure, into which I had stepped to examine some 
ancient and curious wood-carvings within the choir. The 
woman in attendance greeted me with a smile, (which 
always glimmers forth on the feminine visage, I know 
not why, when a wedding is in question,) and asked me 
to take a seat in the nave till some poor parties were 
married, it being the Easter holidays, and a good time for 
them to marry, because no fees would be demanded by 
tffe clergyman. I sat down accordingly, and soon the 
parson and his clerk appeared at the altar, and a con- 
siderable crowd of people made their entrance at a side- 
door, and ranged themselves in a long, huddled line across 
the chancel. They were my acquaintances of the poor 
streets, or persons in a precisely similar condition of life, 
and were now come to their marriage-ceremony in just 
such garbs as I had always seen them wear : the men in 
their loafers' coats, out at elbows, or their laborers' 
jackets, defaced with grimy toil ; the women drawing 
their shabby shawls tighter about their shoulders, to hide 
the raggedness beneath ; all of them unbrushed, un- 
shaven, unwashed, uncombed, and wrinkled with penury 
and care ; nothing virgin-like in the brides, nor hopeful 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 355 

or energetic in the bridegrooms; — they were, in short, 
the mere rags and tatters of the human race, whom some 
east-wind of evil omen, howling along the streets, had 
chanced to sweep together into an unfragrant heap. 
Each and all of them, conscious of his or her individual 
misery, had blundered into the strange miscalculation of 
supposing that they could lessen the sum of it by multi- 
plying it into the misery of another person. All the 
couples (and it was difficult, in such a confused crowd, to 
compute exactly their number) stood up at once, and had 
execution done upon them in the lump, the clergyman 
addressing only small parts of the service to each indi- 
vidual pair, but so managing the larger portion as to in- 
clude the whole company without the trouble of repe- 
tition. By this compendious contrivance, one would 
apprehend, he came dangerously near making every 
man and woman the husband or wife of every other ; 
nor, perhaps, would he have perpetrated much additional 
mischief by the mistake ; but, after receiving a benedic- 
tion in common, they assorted themselves in their own 
fashion, as they only knew how, and departed to the gar- 
rets, or the cellars, or the unsheltered street-corners, 
where their honeymoon and subsequent lives were to be 
spent. The parson smiled decorously, the clerk and the 
sexton grinned broadly, the female attendant tittered al- 
most aloud, and even the married parties seemed to see 
something exceedingly funny in the affair ; but for my 
part, though generally apt enough to be tickled by a joke, 
I laid it away in my memory as one of the saddest sights 
I ever looked upon. 

Not very long afterwards, I happened to be passing the 
same venerable Cathedral, and heard a clang of joyful 



356 OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY. 

bells, and beheld a bridal party coining down the steps 
towards a carriage and four horses, with a portly coach- 
man and two postilions, that waited at the gate. One 
parson and one service had amalgamated' the wretched- 
ness of a score of paupers ; a Bishop and three or four 
clergymen had combined their spiritual might to forge 
the golden links of this other marriage-bond. The bride- 
groom's mien had a sort of careless and kindly Eng- 
lish pride ; the bride floated along in her white drapery, 
a creature so nice and delicate that it was a luxury to 
see her, and a pity that her silk slippers should touch 
anything so grimy as the old stones of the churchyard 
avenue. The crowd of ragged people, who always clus- 
ter to witness what they may of an aristocratic wedding, 
broke into audible admiration of the bride's beauty and 
the bridegroom's manliness, and uttered prayers and 
ejaculations (possibly paid for in alms) for the happiness 
of both. If the most favorable of earthly conditions 
could make them happy, they had every prospect of it. 
They were going to live on their abundance in one of 
those stately and delightful English homes, such as no 
other people ever created or inherited, a hall set far and 
safe within its own private grounds, and surrounded with 
venerable trees, shaven lawns, rich shrubbery, and trim- 
mest pathways, the whole so artfully contrived and tended 
that summer rendered it a paradise, and even winter 
would hardly disrobe it of its beauty ; and all this fair 
property seemed more exclusively and inalienably their 
own, because of its descent through many forefathers, 
each of whom had added an improvement or a charm, 
and thus transmitted it with a stronger stamp of rightful 
possession to his heir. And is it possible, after all, that 



OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISII POVERTY. 357 

there may be a flaw in the title-deeds? Is, or is not, the 
system wrong that gives one married pair so immense a 
superfluity of luxurious home, and shuts out a million 
others from any home whatever ? One day or another, 
safe as they deem themselves, and safe as the hereditary 
temper of the people really tends to make them, the 
gentlemen of England will be compelled to face this 
question. 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 

It has often perplexed me to imagine how an English- 
man will be able to reconcile himself to any future state 
of existence from which the earthly institution of dinner 
shall be excluded. Even if he fail to take his appetite 
along with him, (which it seems to me hardly possible to 
believe, since this endowment is so essential to his com- 
position,) the immortal day must still admit an interim 
of two or three hours during which he will be conscious 
of a slight distaste, at all events, if not an absolute re- 
pugnance, to merely spiritual nutriment. The idea of 
dinner has so imbedded itself among his highest and 
deepest characteristics, so illuminated itself with intellect 
and softened itself with the kindest emotions of his heart, 
so linked itself with Church and State, and grown so 
majestic with long hereditary customs and ceremonies, 
that, by taking it utterly away, Death, instead of putting 
the final touch to his perfection, would leave him in- 
finitely less complete than we have already known him. 
He could not be roundly happy. Paradise, among all its 
enjoyments, would lack one daily felicity which his som- 
bre little island possessed. Perhaps it is not irreverent 
to conjecture that a provision may have been made, in 
this particular, for the Englishman's exceptional neces- 
sities. It strikes me that Milton was of the opinion here 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 359 

suggested, and may have intended to throw out a delight- 
ful and consolatory hope for his countrymen, when he 
represents the genial archangel as playing his part with 
such excellent appetite at Adam's dinner-table, and con- 
fining himself to fruit and vegetables only because, in 
those early days of her housekeeping, Eve had no more 
acceptable viands to set before him. Milton, indeed, had 
a true English taste for the pleasures of the table, 
though refined by the lofty and poetic discipline to which 
he had- subjected himself. It is delicately implied in the 
refection in Paradise, and more substantially, though still 
elegantly, betrayed in the sonnet proposing to " Lau- 
rence, of virtuous father virtuous son," a series of nice 
little dinners in midwinter ; and it blazes fully out in that 
untasted banquet which, elaborate as it was, Satan tossed 
up in a trice from the kitchen-ranges of Tartarus. 

Among this people, indeed, so wise in their generation, 
dinner has a kind of sanctity quite independent of the 
dishes that may be set upon the table ; so that, if it be 
only a mutton-chop, they treat it with due reverence, and 
are rewarded with a degree of enjoyment "which such 
reckless devourers as ourselves do not often find in our 
richest abundance. It is good to see how stanch they are 
after fifty or sixty years of heroic eating, still relying 
upon their digestive powers and indulging a vigorous ap- 
petite ; whereas an American has generally lost the one 
and learned to distrust the other long before reaching the 
earliest decline of life ; and thenceforward he makes little 
account of his dinner, and dines at his peril, if at all. I 
know not whether my countrymen will allow me to tell 
them, though I think it scarcely too much to affirm, that, 
on this side of the water, people never dine. At any 



360 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

rate, abundantly as Nature has provided us with most of 
the material requisites, the highest possible dinner has 
never yet been eaten in America. It is the consummate 
flower of civilization and refinement ; and our inability 
to produce it, or to appreciate its admirable beauty, if a 
happy inspiration should bring it into bloom, marks 
fatally the limit of culture which we have attained. 

It is not to be supposed, however, that the mob of cul- 
tivated Englishmen know how to dine in this elevated 
sense. The unpolishable ruggedness of the national 
character is still an impediment to them, even in that 
particular line where they are best qualified to excel. 
Though often present at good men's feasts, I remember 
only a single dinner, which, while lamentably conscious 
that many of its higher excellences were thrown away 
upon me, I yet could feel to be a perfect work of art. It 
could not, without unpardonable coarseness, be styled a 
matter of animal enjoyment, because, out of the very per- 
fection of that lower bliss, there had arisen a dream-like 
development of spiritual happiness. As in the master- 
pieces of painting and poetry, there was a something in- 
tangible, a final cleliciousness that only fluttered about 
your comprehension, vanishing whenever you tried to 
detain it, and compelling you to recognize it by faith 
rather than sense. It seemed as if a diviner set of 
senses were requisite, and had been partly supplied, for 
the special fruition of this banquet, and that the guests 
around the table (only eight in number) were becoming 
so educated, polished, and softened, by the delicate influ- 
ences of what they ate and drank, as to be now a little 
more than mortal for the nonce. And there was that 
gentle, delicious sadness, too, which we find in the very 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 3G1 

summit of our most exquisite enjoyments, and feel it a 
charm beyond all the gayety through which it keeps 
breathing its undertone. In the present case, it was 
worth a heavier sigh, to reflect that such a festal achieve- 
ment, — the production of so much art, skill, fancy, in- 
vention, and perfect taste, — the growth of all the ages, 
which appeared to have been ripening for this hour, since 
man first began to eat and to moisten his food with wine, 
— must lavish its happiness upon so brief a moment, 
when other beautiful things can be made a joy forever. 
Yet a dinner like this is no better than we can get, any 
day. at the rejuvenescent Cornhill Coffee-House, unless 
the whole man. with soul, intellect, and stomach, is ready 
to appreciate it, and unless, moreover, there is such a 
harmony in all the circumstances and accompaniments, 
and especially such a pitch of well-according minds, that 
nothing shall jar rudely against the guest's thoroughly 
awakened sensibilities. The world, and especially our 
part of it, being the rough, ill-assorted, and tumultuous 
place we find it, a beefsteak is about as good as any other 
dinner. 

The foregoing reminiscence, however, has drawn me 
aside from the main object of my sketch, in which I pur- 
posed to give a slight idea of those public, or partially 
public banquets, the custom of which so thoroughly pre- 
vails among the English people, that nothing is ever 
decided upon, in matters of peace or war, until they 
have chewed upon it in the shape of roast-beef, and 
talked it fully over in their cups. Nor are these fes- 
tivities merely occasional, but of stated recurrence in all 
considerable municipalities and associated bodies. The 
most ancient times appear to have been as familiar with 



362 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

them as the Englishmen of to-day. In many of the old 
English towns, you find some stately Gothic hall or 
chamber in which the Mayor and other authorities of the 
place have long held their sessions ; and always, in con- 
venient contiguity, there is a dusky kitchen, with an im- 
mense fireplace where an ox might lie roasting at his 
ease, though the less gigantic scale of modern cookery 
may now have permitted the cobwebs to gather in its 
chimney. St. Mary's Hall, in Coventry, is so good a 
specimen of an ancient banqueting-room, that perhaps I 
may profitably devote a page or two to the description 
of it. 

In a narrow street, opposite to St. Michael's Church, 
one of the three famous spires of Coventry, you behold 
a mediaeval edifice, in the basement of which is such a 
venerable and now deserted kitchen as I have above 
alluded to, and, on the same level, a cellar, with low 
stone pillars and intersecting arches, like the crypt of a 
cathedral. Passing up a well-worn staircase, the oaken 
balustrade of which is as black as ebony, you enter the 
fine old hall, some sixty feet in length, and broad and 
lofty in proportion. It is lighted by six windows of 
modern stained glass, on one side, and by the immense 
and magnificent arch of another window at the farther 
end of the room, its rich and ancient panes constituting a 
genuine historical piece, in which are represented some 
of the kingly personages of old times, with their heraldic 
blazonries'. Notwithstanding the colored light thus thrown 
into the hall, and though it was noonday when I last saw 
it, the panelling of black oak, and some faded tapestry 
that hung round the walls, together with the cloudy vault 
of the roof above, made a gloom, which the richness only 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 3G3 

nminated into more appreciable effect. The tapestry is 
nought with figures in the dress of Henry VI.'s time, 
shich is the date of the hall.) and is regarded by anti- 
uaries as authentic evidence both for the costume of that 
poeh, and, I believe, for the actual portraiture of men 
.nown in history. They are as colorless as ghosts, how- 
■ver. and vanish drearily into the old stitch-work of their 
jubstance when you try to make them out. Coats-of- 
arms were formerly emblazoned all round the hall, but 
have been almost rubbed out by people hanging their 
overcoats against them or by women with dishclouts 
and scrubbing-brushes, obliterating hereditary glories in 
their blind hostility to dust and spiders' webs. Full- 
length portraits of several English kings, Charles II". 
being the earliest, hang on the walls ; and on the dais, or 
elevated part of the floor, stands an antique chair of 
state, which several royal characters are traditionally 
said to have occupied while feasting here with their 
loyal subjects of Coventry. It is roomy enough for a 
person of kingly bulk, or even two such, but angular and 
uncomfortable, reminding me of the oaken settles which 
used to be seen in old-fashioned New England kitchens. 

Overhead, supported by a self-sustaining power, with- 
out the aid of a single pillar, is the original ceiling of 
oak, precisely similar in shape to the roof of a barn, with 
all the beams and rafters plainly to be seen. At the re- 
mote height of sixty feet, you hardly discern that they 
are carved with figures of angels and doubtless many 
other devices, of which the admirable Gothic art is 
wasted in the duskiness that has so long been brood- 
ing there. Over the entrance of the hall, opposite the 
great arched window, the party-colored radiance of which 



364 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

glimmers faintly through the interval, is a gallery for 
minstrels ; and a row of ancient suits of armor is sus- 
pended from its balustrade. It impresses me, too, (for, 
having gone so far, I would fain leave nothing un- 
touched upon,) that I remember, somewhere about these 
venerable precincts, a picture of the Countess Godiva on 
horseback, in which the artist has been so niggardly of 
that illustrious lady's hair, that, if she had no ampler 
garniture, there was certainly much need for the good 
peoj)le of Coventry to shut their eyes. After all my 
pains, I fear that I have made but a poor hand at the 
description, as regards a transference of the scene from 
my own mind to the reader's. It gave me a most vivid 
idea of antiquity that had been very little tampered 
with ; insomuch that, if a group of steel-clad knights had 
come clanking through the doorway, and a bearded and 
bcruffed old figure had handed in a stately dame, rustling 
in gorgeous robes of a long-forgotten fashion, unveiling a 
face of beauty somewhat tarnished in the mouldy tomb, 
yet stepping majestically to the trill of harp and viol 
from the minstrels' gallery, while the rusty armor re- 
sponded with a hollow ringing sound beneath, — why, I 
should have felt that these shadows, once so familiar with 
the spot, had a better right in St. Mary's Hall than I, a 
stranger from a far country which has no Past. But the 
moral of the foregoing description is to show how tena- 
ciously this love of pompous dinners, this reverence for 
dinner as a sacred institution, has caught hold of the Eng- 
lish character ; since, from the earliest recognizable pe- 
riod, we find them building their civic banqueting-halls as 
magnificently as their palaces or cathedrals. 

I know not whether the hall just described is now used 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 36a 

for festive purposes, but others of similar antiquity and 
splendor still are. For example, there is Barber Sur- 
geons' Hall, in London, a very fine old room, adorned 
with admirably carved wood-work on the ceiling and 
walls. It is also enriched with Holbein's masterpiece, 
representing a grave assemblage of barbers and sur- 
geons, all portraits, (w^ith such extensive beards that 
methinks one half of the company might have been 
profitably occupied in trimming the other,) kneeling be- 
fore King Henry VIII. Sir Robert Peel is said to have 
offered a thousand pounds for the liberty of cutting out 
one of the heads from this picture, he conditioning to 
have a perfect fac-simile painted in. The room has many 
other pictures of distinguished members of the company 
in long-past times, and of some of the monarchs and 
statesmen of England, all darkened with age, but dark- 
ened into such ripe magnificence as only age could be- 
stow. It is not my design to inflict any more specimens 
of ancient hall-painting on the reader ; but it may be 
worth while to touch upon other modes of stateliness that 
still survive in these time-honored civic feasts, where 
there appears to be a singular assumption of dignity and 
solemn pomp by respectable citizens who would never 
dream of claiming any privilege of rank outside of their 
own sphere. Thus, I saw two caps of state for the 
warden and junior warden of the company, caps of silver 
(real coronets or crowns, indeed, for these city-grandees) 
wrought in open-work and lined with crimson velvet. In 
a strong-closet, opening from the hall, there was a great 
deal of rich plate to furnish forth the banquet-table, com- 
prising hundreds of forks and spoons, a vast silver punch- 
bowl, the gift of some jolly king or other, and, besides a 



3G6 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

multitude of less noticeable vessels, two loving-cups, 
very elaborately wrought in silver gilt, oue presented by 
Henry VIII., the other by Charles II. These cups, in- 
cluding the covers and pedestals, are very large and 
weighty, although the bowl-part would hardly contain 
more than half a pint of wine, which, when the custom 
was first established, each guest was probably expected 
to drink off at a draught. In passing them from hand 
to hand adown a long table of compotators, there is a 
peculiar ceremony which I may hereafter have occasion 
to describe. Meanwhile, if I might assume such a lib- 
erty, I should be glad to invite the reader to the official 
dinner-table of his Worship, the Mayor, at a large Eng- 
ligh seaport where I spent several years. 

The Mayor's dinner-parties occur as often as once a 
fortnight, and, inviting his guests by fifty or sixty at a 
time, his Worship probably assembles at his board most 
of the eminent citizens and distinguished personages of 
the town and neighborhood more than once during his 
year's incumbency, and very much, no doubt, to the pro- 
motion of good feeling among individuals of opposite 
parties and diverse pursuits in life. A miscellaneous 
party of Englishmen can always find more comfortable 
ground to meet upon than as many Americans, their dif- 
ferences of opinion being incomparably less radical than 
ours, and it being the sincerest wish of all their hearts, 
whether they call themselves Liberals or what not, that 
nothing in this world shall ever be greatly altered from 
what it has been and is. Thus there is seldom such a 
virulence of political hostility that it may not be dis- 
solved in a glass or two of wine, without making the 
good liquor any more dry or bitter than accords with 
English taste. 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 367 

The first dinner of this kind at which I had the honor 
to be present took place during assize-time, and included 
among the guests the judges and the prominent members 
of the bar. Reaching the Town Hall at seven o'clock, I 
communicated my name to one of several splendidly 
dressed footmen, and he repeated it to another on the 
first staircase, by whom it was passed to a third, and 
thence to a fourth at the door of the reception-room, los- 
ing all resemblance to the original sound in the course 
of these transmissions ; so that I had the advantage of 
making my entrance in the character of a stranger, not 
only to the whole company, but to myself as well. His 
Worship, however, kindly recognized me, and put me on 
speaking-terms with two or three gentlemen, whom I 
found very affable, and all the more hospitably attentive 
on the score of my nationality. It is very singular how 
kind an Englishman will almost invariably be to an in- 
dividual American, without ever bating a jot of his preju- 
dice against the American character in the lump. My 
new acquaintances took evident pains to put me at my 
ease ; and, in requital of their good-nature, I soon began 
to look round at the general company in a critical spirit, 
making my crude observations apart, and drawing silent 
inferences, of the correctness of which I should not have 
been half so well satisfied a year afterwards as at that 
moment. 

There were two judges present, a good many lawyers, 
and a few officers of the army in uniform. The other 
guests seemed to be principally of the mercantile class, 
and among them was a ship-owner from Nova Scotia, 
with whom I coalesced a little, inasmuch as we were 
born with the same sky over our heads, and an unbroken 



3G8 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

continuity of soil between his abode and mine. There 
was one old gentleman, whose character I never made 
out, with powdered hair, clad in black breeches and silk 
stockings, and wearing a rapier at his side ; otherwise, 
with the exception of the military uniforms, there was 
little or no pretence of official costume. It being the 
first considerable assemblage of Englishmen that I had 
seen, my honest impression about them was, that they 
were a heavy and homely set of people, with a remark- 
able, roughness of aspect and behavior, not repulsive, but 
beneath which it required more familiarity with the na- 
tional character than I then possessed always to detect 
the good breeding of a gentleman. Being generally mid- 
dle-aged, or still farther advanced, they were by no means 
graceful in figure ; for the comeliness of the youthful 
Englishman rapidly diminishes with years, his body ap- 
pearing to grow longer, his legs to abbreviate themselves, 
and his stomach to assume the dignified prominence which 
justly belongs to that metropolis of his system. His face 
(what with the acridity of the atmosphere, ale at lunch, 
wine at dinner, and a well-digested abundance of succu- 
lent food) gets red and mottled, and develops at least one 
additional chin, with a promise of more ; so that, finally, 
a stranger recognizes his animal part at the most super- 
ficial glance, but must take time and a little pains to dis- 
cover the intellectual. Comparing him with an American, 
I really thought that our national paleness and lean habit 
of flesh gave us greatly the advantage in an aesthetic 
point of view. It seemed to me, moreover, that the Eng- 
lish tailor had not done so much as he might and ought 
for these heavy figures, but had gone on wilfully exag- 
gerating their uncouthness by the roominess of their gar- 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 360 

ments ; he had evidently no idea of accuracy of fit, and 
smartness was entirely out of his line. But, to be quite 
open with the reader, I afterwards learned to think that 
this aforesaid tailor has a deeper art than his brethren 
among ourselves, knowing how to dress his customers 
with such individual propriety that they look as if they 
were born in their clothes, the fit being to the charac- 
ter rather than the form. If you make an Englishman 
smart, (unless he be a very exceptional one, of whom I 
have seen a few,) you make him a monster ; his best 
aspect is that of ponderous respectability. 

To make an end of these first impressions, I fancied 
that not merely the Suffolk bar, but the bar of any in- 
land county in New England, might show a set of thin- 
visaged men, looking wretchedly worn, sallow, deeply 
wrinkled across the forehead, and grimly furrowed about 
the mouth, with whom these heavy-cheeked English 
lawyers, slow-paced and fat-witted as they must needs 
be, would stand very little chance in a professional con- 
test. How that matter might turn out, I am unquali- 
fied to decide. But I state these results of my earliest 
glimpses at Englishmen, not for what they are worth, but 
because I ultimately gave them up as worth little or 
nothing. In course of time, I came to the conclusion 
that Englishmen of all ages are a rather good-looking 
people, dress in admirable taste from their own point of 
view, and. under a surface never silken to the touch, have 
a refinement of manners too thorough and genuine to be 
thought of as a separate endowment, — that is to say, if 
the individual himself be a man of station, and has had 
gentlemen for his father and grandfather. The sturdy 
Anglo-Saxon nature does not refine itself short of the 
24 



370 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

third generation. The tradesmen, too, and all other 
classes, have their own proprieties. The only value of 
my criticisms, therefore, lay in their exemplifying the 
proneness of a traveller to measure one people by the 
distinctive characteristics of another, — as English writers 
invariably measure us, and take upon themselves to be 
disgusted accordingly, instead of trying to find out some 
principle of beauty with which we may be in conformity. 
In due time we were summoned to the table, and went 
thither in no solemn procession, but with a good deal of 
jostling, thrusting behind, and scrambling for places when 
we reached our destination. The legal gentlemen, I sus- 
pect, were responsible for this indecorous zeal, which 
I never afterwards remarked in a similar party. The 
dining-hall was of noble size, and, like the other rooms 
of the suite, was gorgeously painted and gilded and bril- 
liantly illuminated. There was a splendid table-service, 
and a noble array of footmen, some of them in plain 
clothes, and others wearing the town-livery, richly deco- 
rated with gold lace, and themselves excellent specimens 
of the blooming young manhood of Britain. When we 
were fairly seated, it was certainly an agreeable spectacle 
to look up and clown the long vista of earnest faces, and 
behold them so resolute, so conscious that there was an 
important business in hand, and so determined to be 
equal to the occasion. Indeed, Englishman or not, I 
hardly know what can be prettier than a snow-white 
table-cloth, a huge heap of flowers as a central decora- 
tion, bright silver, rich china, crystal glasses, decanters of 
Sherry at due intervals, a French roll and an artistically 
folded napkin at each plate, all that airy portion of a ban- 
quet, in short, that comes before the first mouthful, the 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 371 

whole illuminated by a blaze of artificial light, without 
which a dinner of made-dishes looks spectral, and the 
simplest viands are the best. Printed bills-of-fare were 
distributed, representing an abundant least, no part of 
which appeared on the table until called for in separate 
plates. I have entirely forgotten what it was, but deem 
it no great matter, inasmuch as there is a pervading com- 
monplace and identicalness in the composition of exten- 
sive dinners, on account of the impossibility of supplying 
a hundred guests with anything particularly delicate or 
rare. It was suggested to me that certain juicy old gen- 
tlemen had a private understanding what to call for, and 
that it would be good policy in a stranger to follow in 
their footsteps through the feast. I did not care to do so, 
however, because, like Sancho Panza's dip out of Cama- 
cho's caldron, any sort of potluck at such a table would 
be sure to suit my purpose ; so I chose a dish or two on 
my own judgment, and, getting through my labors be- 
times, had great pleasure in seeing the Englishmen toil 
onward to the end. 

They drank rather copiously, too, though wisely ; for I 
observed that they seldom took Hock, and let the Cham- 
pagne bubble slowly away out of the goblet, solacing 
themselves with Sherry, but tasting it warily before 
bestowing their final confidence. Their taste in wanes, 
however, did not seem so exquisite, and certainly was not 
so various, as that to which many Americans pretend. 
This foppery of an intimate acquaintance with rare vin- 
tages does not suit a sensible Englishman, as he is very 
much in earnest about his wines, and adopts one or two 
as his life-long friends, seldom exchanging them for any 
Delilahs of a moment, and reaping the reward of his con- 



372 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

stancy in an unimpaired stomach, and only so much gout 
as he deems wholesome and desirable. Knowing well 
the measure of his powers, he is not apt to fill his glass 
too often. Society, indeed, would hardly tolerate habit- 
ual imprudences of that kind, though, in my opinion, the 
Englishmen now upon the stage could carry off their 
three bottles, at need, with as steady a gait as any of 
their forefathers. It is not so very long since the three- 
bottle heroes sank finally under the table. It may be (at 
least, I should be glad if it were true) that there was an 
occult sympathy between our temperance reform, now 
somewhat in abeyance, and the almost simultaneous dis- 
appearance of hard-drinking among the respectable classes 
in England. I remember a middle-aged gentleman tell- 
ing me (in illustration of the very slight importance 
attached to breaches of temperance within the memory 
of men not yet old) that he had seen a certain magis- 
trate, Sir John Linkwater, or Drinkwater, — but I think 
the jolly old knight could hardly have staggered under so 
perverse a misnomer as this last, — while sitting on the 
magisterial bench, pull out a crown-piece and hand it to 
the clerk. " Mr. Clerk," said Sir John, as if it were the 
most indifferent fact in the world, " I was drunk last night. 
There are my five shillings." 

During the dinner, I had a good deal of pleasant con- 
versation with the gentlemen on either side of me. One 
of them, a lawyer, expatiated with great unction on the 
social standing of the judges. Representing the dignity 
and authority of the Crown, they take precedence, during 
assize-time, of the highest military men in the kingdom, 
of the Lord- Lieutenant of the co'unty, of the Archbishops, 
of the royal Dukes, and even of the Prince of Wales. 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 373 

For the nonce, they are the greatest men in England. 
With a glow of professional complacency that amounted 
to enthusiasm, my friend assured me, that, in case of a 
royal dinner, a judge, if actually holding an assize, would 
be expected to offer his arm and take the Queen herself 
to the table. Happening to be in company with some 
of these elevated personages, on subsequent occasions, it 
appeared to me that the judges are fully conscious of 
their paramount claims to respect, and take rather more 
pains to impress them on their ceremonial inferiors than 
men of high hereditary rank are apt to do. Bishops, if 
it be not irreverent to say so, are sometimes marked by a 
similar characteristic. Dignified position is so sweet to 
an Englishman, that he needs to be born in it, and to feel 
it thoroughly incorporated with his nature from its orig- 
inal germ, in order to keep him from flaunting it obtru- 
sively in the faces of innocent bystanders. 

My companion on the other side was a thick-set, middle- 
aged man, uncouth in manners, and ugly where none were 
handsome, with a dark, roughly hewn visage, that looked 
grim in repose, and seemed to hold within itself the ma- 
chinery of a very terrific frown. He ate with resolute 
appetite, and let slip few opportunities of imbibing what- 
ever liquids happened to be passing by. I was meditat- 
ing in what way this grisly featured table-fellow might 
most safely be accosted, when he turned to me with a 
surly sort of kindness, and invited me to take a glass of 
wine. "We then began a conversation that abounded, on 
his part, with sturdy sense, and, somehow or other, brought 
me closer to him than I had yet stood to an Englishman. 
I should hardly have taken him to be an educated man, 
certainly not a scholar of accurate training ; and yet he 



374 " CIVIC BANQUETS. 

seemed to have all the resources of education and trained 
intellectual power at command. My fresh Americanism, 
and watchful observation of English characteristics, ap- 
peared either to interest or amuse him, or perhaps both. 
Under the mollifying influences of abundance of meat and 
drink, he grew very gracious, (not that I ought to use 
such a phrase to describe his evidently genuine good- will,) 
and by and by expressed a wish for further acquaintance, 
asking me to call at his rooms in London and inquire for 
Sergeant Wilkins, — throwing out the name forcibly, as 
if he had no occasion to be ashamed of it. I remembered 
Dean Swift's retort to Sergeant Bettesworth on a similar 
announcement, — " Of what regiment, pray, Sir ? " — and 
fancied that the same question might not have been quite 
amiss, if applied to the rugged individual at. my side. But 
I heard of him subsequently as one of the prominent men 
at the English bar, a rough customer, and a terribly strong 
champion in criminal cases ; and it caused me more re- 
gret than might have been expected, on so slight an ac- 
quaintanceship, when, not long afterwards, I saw his death 
announced in the newspapers. Not rich in attractive qual- 
ities, he possessed, I think, the most attractive one of 
all, — thorough manhood. 

•After the cloth was removed, a goodly group of decan- 
ters were set before the Mayor, who sent them forth on 
their outward voyage, full freighted with Port, Sherry, 
Madeira, and Claret, of which excellent liquors, me- 
thought, the latter found least acceptance among the* 
guests. "When every man had filled his glass, his Wor- 
ship stood up and proposed a toast. It was, of course, 
" Our gracious Sovereign," or words to that effect ; and 
immediately a band of musicians, whose preliminary 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 375 

tootings and thrummings I had already heard behind me, 
struck up " God save the Queen," and the whole company 
rose with one impulse to assist in singing that famous na- 
tional anthem. It was the first time in my lite that I had 
ever seen a body of men, or even a single man, under the, 
active influence of the sentiment of Loyalty ; foij though 
we call ourselves loyal to our country and institutions, 
and prove it by our readiness to shed blood and sacrifice 
life in their behalf, still the principle is as cold and lutrd, 
in an American bosom, as the steel spring that puts in 
motion a powerful machinery. In the Englishman's sys- 
tem, a force similar to that of our steel spring is generated 
by the warm throbbings of human hearts. He clothes 
our bare abstraction in flesh and blood, — at present, in 
the flesh and blood of a woman, — and manages to com- 
bine love, awe, and intellectual reverence, all in one emo- 
tion, and to embody his mother, his wife, his children, the 
whole idea of kindred, in a single person, and make her 
the representative of his country and its laws. We 
Americans smile superior, as I did at the Mayor's table ; 
and yet, I fancy, we lose some very agreeable titillations 
of the heart in consequence of our proud prerogative of 
caring no more about our President than for a man of 
straw, or a stuffed scarecrow straddling in a cornfield. 

But, to say the truth, the spectacle struck me rather 
ludicrously, to see this party of stout middle-aged and 
elderly gentlemen, in the fulness of meat and drink, their 
ample and ruddy faces glistening with wine, perspiration, 
and enthusiasm, rumbling out those strange old stanzas 
from the very bottom of their hearts and stomachs, which 
two organs, in the English interior arrangement, lie closer 
together than in ours. The song seemed to me the rud- 



376 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

est old ditty in the world ; but I could not wonder at its 
universal acceptance and indestructible popularity, con- 
sidering how inimitably it expresses the national faith 
and feeling as regards the inevitable righteousness of 
England, the Almighty's consequent respect and partial- 
ity for that redoubtable little island, and His presumed 
readiness to strengthen its defence against the contuma- 
cious wickedness and knavery of all other principalities or 
republics. Tennyson himself, though evidently English 
to the very last prejudice, could not write half so good a 
song for the purpose. Finding that the entire dinner- 
table struck in, with voices of every pitch between rolling 
thunder and the squeak of a cart-wheel, and that the 
strain was not of such delicacy as to be much hurt by the 
harshest of them, I determined to lend my own assistance 
in swelling the triumphant roar. It seemed but a proper 
courtesy to the first Lady in the land, whose guest, in the 
largest sense, I might consider myself. Accordingly, my 
first tuneful efforts (and probably my last, for I purpose 
not to sing any more, unless it be " Hail Columbia " on 
the restoration of the Union) were poured freely forth in 
honor of Queen Victoria. The Sergeant smiled like the 
carved head of a Swiss nut-cracker, and the other gen- 
tlemen in my neighborhood, by nods and gestures, evinc- 
ed grave approbation of so suitable a tribute to English 
superiority ; and we finished our stave and sat down in 
an extremely happy frame of mind. 

Other toasts followed in honor of the great institutions 
and interests of the country, and speeches in response to 
each were made by individuals whom the Mayor desig- 
nated or the company called for. None of them im- 
pressed me with a very high idea of English postprandial 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 377 

jratory. It is inconceivable, indeed, what ragged and 
shapeless utterances most Englishmen are satisfied to 
pre vent to, without attempting anything like artistic 
shape, but clapping on a patch here and another there, 

ind ultimately getting out what they want to say, and 
generally with a result of sufficiently good sense, hut in 
some such disorganized mass as if they had thrown it up 
ather than spoken it. It seemed to me thai this was almost 
is much by choice as necessity. An Englishman, ambitious 
»f public favor, should not be too smooth. If an orator 
s glib, his countrymen distrust him. They dislike sniart- 
less. The stronger and heavier his thoughts, the better, 
►rovided there be an (lenient of commonplace running 
hrough them; and any rough, yet never vulgar force of 
expression, such as would knock an opponent down, "if it 
fit him, only it must not be too personal, is altogether to 
Iieir taste ; but a studied neatness of language, or other 
iuch superficial graces, they cannot abide. They do not 
)ften permit a man to make himself a fine orator of 
nalice aforethought, that is, unless he be a nobleman, (as, 
or example, Lord Stanley, of the Derby family,) who, 
IS an hereditary legislator and necessarily a public speaker, 
s bound to remedy a poor natural delivery in the best 
way he can. On the whole, I partly agree with them, 
md, if I cared for any oratory whatever, should be as 
ikely to applaud theirs as our own. When an English 
speaker sits down, you feel that you have been listening 
to a real man, and not to an actor ; his sentiments have 
i wholesome earth-smell in them, though, very likely, this 
Apparent naturalness is as much an art as what we ex- 
pend in rounding a sentence or elaborating a peroration. 
It is one good effect of this inartificial style, that no- 



378 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

body in England seems to feel any shyness about shovel- 
ling the untrimmed and untrimmable ideas out of his 
mind for the benefit of an audience. At least, nobody 
did on the occasion now in hand, except a poor little 
Major of Artillery, who responded for the Army in a 
thin, quavering voice, with a terribly hesitating trickle of 
fragmentary ideas, and, I question not, would rather have 
been bayoneted in front of his batteries than to have said 
a word. Not his own mouth, but the cannon's, was this 
poor Major's proper organ of utterance. 

While I was thus amiably occupied in criticising my 
fellow-guests, the Mayor had got up to propose another 
toast ; and listening rather inattentively to the first sen- 
tence or two, I soon became sensible of a drift in his 
Worship's remarks that made me glance apprehensively 
towards Sergeant Wilkins. " Yes," grumbled that gruff 
personage, shoving a decanter of Port towards me, " it is 
your turn next " ; and seeing in my face, I suppose, the 
consternation of a wholly unpractised orator, he kindly 
added, — " It is nothing. A mere acknowledgment will 
answer the purpose. The less you say, the better they 
will like it." That being the case, I suggested that per- 
haps they would like it best if I said nothing at all. But 
the Sergeant shook his head. Now, on first receiving 
the Mayor's invitation to dinner, it had occurred to me 
that I might possibly be brought into my present predica- 
ment ; Jt>ut I had dismissed the idea from my mind as too 
disagreeable to be entertained, and, moreover, as so alien 
from my disposition and character that Fate surely could 
not keep such a misfortune in store for me. If nothing 
else prevented, an earthquake or the crack of doom would 
certainly interfere before I need rise to speak. Yet here 



CIVIC BANQUETS 379 

was the Mayor getting on inexorably, — and, indeed, I 
heartily wished that he might get on and on forever, and 
of his wordy wanderings find no end. 

If the gentle reader, my kindest friend and closest con- 
fidant, deigns to desire it, I can impart to him my own 
experience as a public speaker quite as indifferently as if 
it concerned another person. Indeed, it does concern 
another, or a mere spectral phenomenon, for it was not I, 
in my proper and natural self, that sat there at table or 
subsequently rose to speak. At the moment, then, if the 
choice had been offered me whether the Mayor should let 
off a speech at my head or a pistol, I should unhesitat- 
ingly have taken the latter alternative. I had really 
nothing to say, not an idea in my head, nor, which was a 
great deal worse, any flowing words or embroidered sen- 
tences in which to dress out that empty Nothing, and give 
it a cunning aspect of intelligence, such as might last the 
poor vacuity the little time it had to live. But time 
pressed ; the Mayor brought his remarks, affectionately 
eulogistic of the United States and highly complimentary 
to their distinguished representative at that table, to a 
close, amid a vast deal of cheering ; and the band struck 
up " Hail Columbia," I believe, though it might have 
been " Old Hundred," or " God save the Queen " over 
again, for anything that I should have known or cared. 
When the music ceased, there was an intensely disagree- 
able instant, during which I seemed to rend away and 
fling off the habit of a lifetime, and rose, still void of 
ideas, but with preternatural composure, to make a speech. 
The guests rattled on the table, and cried, " Hear ! " most 
vociferously, as if new, at length, in this foolish and idly 
garrulous world, had come the long-expected moment 



380 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

when one golden word was to be spoken; and in that 
imminent crisis, I caught a glimpse of a little bit of an 
effusion of international sentiment, which it might, and 
must, and should do to utter. 

Well ; it was nothing, as the Sergeant had said. What 
surprised me most was the sound of my own voice, which 
I had never before heard at a declamatory pitch, and 
which impressed me as belonging to some other person, 
who, and not myself, would be responsible for the speech : 
a prodigious consolation and encouragement under the cir- 
cumstances ! I went on without the slightest embarrass- 
ment, and sat down amid great applause, wholly unde- 
served by anything that I had spoken, but well won from 
Englishmen, methought, by the new development of pluck 
that alone had enabled me to speak at all. " It was 
handsomely done ! " quoth Sergeant Wilkins ; and I felt 
like a recruit who had been for the first time under fire. 

I would gladly have ended my oratorical career then 
and there forever, but was often placed in a similar or 
worse position, and compelled to meet it as I best might ; 
for this was one of the necessities of an office which I had 
voluntarily taken on my shoulders, and beneath which 
I might be crushed by no moral delinquency on my 
own part, but could not shirk without cowardice and 
shame. My subsequent fortune was various. Once, 
though I felt it to be a kind of imposture, I got a speech 
by heart, and doubtless it might have been a very pretty 
one, only I forgot every syllable at the moment of need, 
and had to improvise another as well as I could. I found 
it a better method to prearrange a few points in my mind, 
and trust to the spur of the occasion, and the kind aid of 
Providence, for enabling me to bring them to bear. The 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 381 

presence of any considerable proportion of personal 
friends generally dumbfounded me. I would rather have 
talked with an enemy in the gate. Invariably, too, I 
w\as much embarrassed by a small audience, and suc- 
ceeded better with a large one, — the sympathy of a 
multitude possessing a buoyant effect, which lifts the 
speaker a little way out of his individuality and tosses 
him towards a perhaps better range of sentiment than his 
private one. Again, if I rose carelessly and confidently, 
with an expectation of going through the business entirely 
at my ease, I often found that I had little or nothing 
to say ; whereas, if I came to the charge in perfect de- 
spair, and at a crisis when failure would have been horri- 
ble, it once or twice happened that the frightful emergency 
concentrated my poor faculties, and enabled me to give 
definite and vigorous expression to sentiments which an 
instant before looked as vague and far off as the clouds 
in the atmosphere. On the whole, poor as my own suc- 
cess may have been, I apprehend that any intelligent 
man with a tongue possesses the chief requisite of ora- 
torical poAver, and may develop many of the others, if he 
deems it worth while to bestow a great amount of labor 
and pains on an object which the most accomplished ora- 
tors, I suspect, have not found altogether satisfactory to 
their highest impulses. At any rate, it must be a re- 
markably true man- who can keep his own elevated con- 
ception of truth when the lower feeling of a multitude is 
assailing his natural sympathies, and who can speak out 
frankly the best that there is in him, when by adulterat- 
ing it a little, or a g<»<»d deal, lie knows that' he may make 
it ten times as acceptable to the audience. 



382 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

This slight article on the civic banquets of England 
would be too wretchedly imperfect, without an attempted 
description of a Lord Major's dinner at the Mansion 
House in London. I should have preferred the annual 
feast at Guildhall, but never had the good fortune to wit- 
ness it. Once, however, I was honored with an invita- 
tion to one of the regular dinners, and gladly accepted it, 
— taking the precaution, nevertheless, though it hardly 
seemed necessary, to inform the City-King, through a 
mutual friend, that I was no fit representative of American 
eloquence, and must humbly make it a condition that I 
should not be expected to open my mouth, except for the 
reception of his Lordship's bountiful hospitality. The 
reply was gracious and acquiescent ; so that I presented 
myself in the great entrance-] lall of the Mansion House, 
at half-past six o'clock, in a state of most enjoyable free- 
dom from the pusillanimous apprehensions that often tor- 
mented me at such times. The Mansion House was built 
in Queen Anne's days, in the very heart of old London, 
and is a palace worthy of its inhabitant, were he really 
as great a man as his traditionary state and pomp would 
seem to indicate. Times are changed, however, since the 
days of Whittington, or even of Hogarth's Industrious 
Apprentice, to whom the highest imaginable reward of 
life-long integrity was a seat in the Lord Mayor's chair. 
People nowadays say that the real dignity and importance 
have perished out of the office, as they do, sooner or 
later, out of all earthly institutions, leaving only a painted 
and gilded shell like that of an Easter egg, and that it is 

o CD' 

only second-rate and third-rate men who now condescend 
to be ambitious of the Mayoralty. I felt a little grieved 
at this ; for the original emigrants of New England had 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 383 

strong sympathies with the people of London, who were 
mostly Puritans in religion and Parliamentarians in poli- 
tics, in the early days of our country ; so that the Lord 
Mayor was a potentate of huge dimensions in the estima- 
tion of our forefathers, and held to be hardly second to 
the prime minister of the throne. The true great men of 
the city now appear to have aims beyond city greatness, 
connecting themselves with national politics, and seeking 
to be identified with the aristocracy of the country. 

In the entrance-hall I was received by a body of foot- 
men dressed in a livery of blue coats and buff breeches, 
in which they looked wonderfully like American Revolu- 
tionary generals, only bedizened with far more lace and 
embroidery than those simple and grand old heroes ever 
dreamed of wearing. There were likewise two Aery im- 
posing figures, whom I should have taken to be military 
men of rank, being arrayed in scarlet coats and large silver 
epaulets ; but they turned out to be officers of the Lord 
Mayor s household, and were now employed in assigning 
to the guests the places which they were respectively to oc- 
cupy at the dinner-table. Our names (for I had included 
myself in a little group of friends) were announced ; and 
ascending the staircase, we met his Lordship in the door- 
way of the first reception-room, where, also, we had the 
advantage of a presentation to the Lady Mayoress. As 
this distinguished couple retired into private life at the 
termination of their year of office, it is inadmissible to 
make any remarks, critical or laudatory, on the manners 
and bearing of two personages suddenly emerging from a 
position of respectable mediocrity into one of preeminent 
dignity within their own sphere. Such individuals almost 
always seem to grow nearly or quite to the full size of 



384 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

their office. If it were desirable to write an essay on 
the latent aptitude of ordinary people for grandeur, we 
have an exemplification in our own country, and on a scale 
incomparably greater than that of the Mayoralty, though 
invested with nothing like the outward magnificence that 
gilds and embroiders the latter. If I have been correctly 
informed, the Lord Mayor's salary is exactly double that 
of the President of the United States, and yet is found 
very inadequate to his necessary expenditure. 

There were two reception-rooms, thrown into one by 
the opening of wide folding-doors ; and though in an old 
style, and not yet so old as to be venerable, they are re- 
markably handsome apartments, lofty as well as spacious, 
with carved ceilings and walls, and at either end a splen- 
did fireplace of white marble, ornamented with sculp- 
tured wreaths of flowers and foliage. The company were 
about three hundred, many of them celebrities in politics, 
war, literature, and science, though I recollect none pre- 
eminently distinguished in either department. But it is 
certainly a pleasant mode of doing honor to men of litera- 
ture, for example, who deserve well of the public, yet do 
not often meet it face to face, thus to bring them together, 
under genial auspices, in connection with persons of note 
in other lines. I know not what may be the Lord 
Mayor's mode or principle of selecting his guests, nor 
whether, during his official term, he can proffer his hospi- 
tality to every man of noticeable talent in the wide world 
of London, nor, in fine, whether his Lordship's invitation 
is much sought for or valued ; but it seemed to me that 
this periodical feast is one of the many sagacious methods 
which the English have contrived for keeping up a good 
understanding among different sorts of people. Like 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 385 

most other distinctions of society, however, I presume 
that the Lord Mayor's card does not often seek out 
modest merit, but comes at last when the recipient is 
conscious of the bore, and doubtful about the honor. 

One very pleasant characteristic, which I never met 
with at any other public or partially public dinner, was 
the presence of ladies. No doubt, they were principally 
the wives and daughters of city magnates ; and if we may 
judge from the many sly allusions in old plays and satiri- 
cal poems, the city of London has always been famous 
for the beauty of its women and the reciprocal attractions 
between them and the men of quality. Be that as it 
might, while straying hither and thither through those 
crowded apartments, I saw much reason for modifying 
certain' heterodox opinions which I had imbibed, in my 
Transatlantic newness and rawness, as regarded the deli- 
cate character and frequent occurrence of English beauty. 
To state the entire truth, (being, at this period, some 
years old in English life,) my taste, I fear, had long since 
begun to be deteriorated by acquaintance with other 
models of feminine loveliness than it was my happiness 
to know in America. I often found, or seemed to find, 
if I may dare to confess it, in the persons of such of my 
dear countrywomen as I now occasionally met, a certain 
meagreness, (Heaven forbid that I should call it scrawni- 
ness !) a deficiency of physical development, a scantiness, 
so to speak, in the pattern of their material make, a pale- 
ness of complexion, a thinness of voice, — all of which 
characteristics, nevertheless, only made me resolve so 
much the more sturdily to uphold these fair creatures as 
angels, because I was sometimes driven to a half-acknowl- 
edgment, that the English ladies, looked at from a lower 
25 



386 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

point of view, were perhaps a little finer animals' than 
they. The advantages of the latter, if any they could 
really be said to have, were all comprised in a few addi- 
tional lumps of clay on their shoulders and other parts 
of their figures. It would be a pitiful bargain to give up 
the ethereal charm of American beauty in exchange for 
half a hundred-weight of human clay ! 

At a given signal we all found our way into an im- 
mense room, called the Egyptian Hall, I know not why, 
except that the architecture was classic, and as different 
as possible from the ponderous style of Memphis and the 
Pyramids. A powerful band played inspiringly as we 
entered, and a brilliant profusion of light shone down on 
two long tables, extending the whole length of the hall, 
and a cross-table between them, occupying nearly its en- 
tire breadth. Glass gleamed and silver glistened on an 
acre or two of snowy damask, over which were set out 
all the accompaniments of a stately feast. We found our 
places without much difficulty, and the Lord Mayor's 
chaplain implored a blessing on the food, — a ceremony 
which the English never omit, at a great dinner or a 
small one, yet consider, I fear, not so much a religious rite 
as a sort of preliminary relish before the soup. 

The soup, of course, on this occasion, was turtle, of 
which, in accordance with immemorial custom, each guest 
was allowed two platefuls, in spite of the otherwise im- 
mitigable law of table-decorum. Indeed, judging from 
the proceedings of the gentlemen near me, I surmised 
that there was no practical limit, except the appetite of 
the guests and the capacity of the soup-tureens. Not 
being fond of this civic dainty, I partook of it but once, 
and then only in accordance with the wise maxim, al- 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 387 

ways to taste a fruit, a wine, or a celebrated dish, at its 
indigenous site ; and the very fountain-head of turtle- 
soup, I suppose, is in the Lord Mayor's dinner-pot. It 
is one of those orthodox customs which people follow for 
half a century without knowing why, to drink a sip of 
rum-punch, in a very small tumbler, after the soup. It 
was excellently well-brewed, and it seemed to me almost 
worth while to sup the soup for the sake of sipping the 
punch. The rest of the dinner was catalogued in a bill-of- 
fare printed on delicate white paper within an arabesque 
border of green and gold. *It looked very good, not 
only in the English and French names of the numerous 
dishes, but also in the positive reality of the dishes them- 
selves, which were all set on the table to be carved and 
distributed by the guests. This ancient and honest method 
is attended with a good deal of trouble, and a lavish effu- 
sion of gravy, yet by no means bestowed or dispensed in 
vain, because you have thereby the absolute assurance of 
a banquet actually before your eyes, instead of a shadowy 
promise in the bill-of-fare, and such meagre fulfilment as 
a single guest can contrive to get upon his individual 
plate. I wonder that Englishmen, who are fond of look- 
ing at prize-oxen in the shape of butcher's-meat, do not 
generally better estimate the aesthetic gormandism of de- 
vouring the whole dinner with their eyesight, before pro- 
ceeding to nibble the comparatively few morsels which, 
after all, the most heroic appetite and widest stomachic 
capacity of mere mortals can enable even an alderman 
really to eat. There fell to my lot three delectable things 
enough, which I take pains to remember, that the reader 
may not go away wholly unsatisfied from the Barmecide 
feast to which I have bidden him, — a red mullet, a plate 



388 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

of mushrooms, exquisitely stewed, and part of a ptarmi- 
gan, a bird of the same family as the grouse, but feeding 
high up towards the summit of the Scotch mountains, 
whence it gets a wild delicacy of flavor very superior to 
that of the artificially nurtured English game-fowl. All 
the other dainties have vanished from my memory as 
completely as those of Prospero's banquet after Ariel had 
clapped his wings over it. The band played at intervals* 
inspiriting us to new efforts, as did likewise the sparkling 
wines which the footmen supplied from an inexhaustible 
cellar, and which the gueSts quaffed with little apparent 
reference to the disagreeable fact that there comes a to- 
morrow morning after every feast. As long as that shall 
be the case, a prudent man can never have full enjoyment 
of his dinner. 

Nearly opposite to me, on the other side of the table, 
sat a young lady in white, whom I am sorely tempted to 
describe, but dare not, because not only the superemi- 
ence of her beauty, but its peculiar character, would 
cause the sketch to be recognized, however rudely it 
might be drawn. I hardly thought that there existed 
such a woman outside of a picture-frame, or the covers 
of a romance : not that I had ever met with her resem- 
blance even there, but, being so distinct and singular an 
apparition, she seemed likelier to find her sisterhood in 
poetry and picture than in real life. Let us turn away 
from her, lest a touch too apt should compel her stately 
and cold and soft and womanly grace to gleam out upon 
my page with a strange repulsion and unattainableness in 
the. very spell that made her beautiful. At her side, and 
familiarly attentive to her, sat a gentleman of whom I 
remember only a hard outline of the nose and forehead, 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 389 

and such a monstrous portent of a beard that you could 
discover no symptom of a mouth, except when he opened 
it to speak, or to put in a morsel of food. Then, indeed, 
you suddenly became aware of a cave hidden behind the 
impervious and darksome shrubbery. There could be no 
doubt who this gentleman and lady were. Any child 
would have recognized them at a glance. It was Blue- 
beard and a new wife (the loveliest of the series, but with 
already a mysterious gloom overshadowing her fair young 
brow) travelling in their honey-moon, and dining, among 
other distinguished strangers, at the Lord Mayor's table. 
After an hour or two of valiant achievement with knife 
and fork came the dessert; and at the point of the festi- 
val where finger-glasses are usually introduced, a large 
silver basin was carried round to the guests, containing 
rose-water, into which we dipped the. ends of our napkins 
and were conscious of a delightful fragrance, instead of 
that heavy and weary odor, the hateful ghost of a defunct 
dinner. This seems to be an ancient custom of the city, 
not confined to the Lord Mayor's table, but never met 
with westward of Temple Bar. 

f During all the feast, in accordance with another ancient 
custom, the origin or purport of which I do not remember 

-tohave heard, there stood a man in armor, with a helmet on 
his head, behind his Lordship's chair. When the after-din- 
ner wine was placed on the table, still another official per- 
sonage appeared behind the chair, and proceeded to make 
a solemn and sonorous proclamation, (in which lie enu- 
merated the principal guests, comprising three or four 
noblemen, several baronets, and plenty of generals, mem- 
bers of Parliament, aldermen, and other names of the il- 
lustrious, one of which sounded strangely familiar to my 



390 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

r—etirs,) ending in some such style as this : " and other gen- 
tlemen and ladies, here present, the Lord Mayor drinks 
to you all in a loving-cup," — giving a sort of sentimental 
twang to the two words, — " and sends it round among 
you ! " And forthwith the loving-cup — several of them, 
indeed, on each side of the tables — came slowly down 
with all the antique ceremony. 

The fashion of it is thus. The Lord Mayor, standing 
up and taking the covered cup in both hands, presents it 
to the guest at his elbow, who likewise rises, and removes 
the cover for his Lordship to drink, which being success- 
fully accomplished, the guest replaces the cover and re- 
ceives the cup into his own hands. He then presents it 
to his next neighbor, that the cover may be again removed 
for himself to take a draught, after which the third j>er- 
son goes through a similar manoeuvre with a fourth, and 
he with a fifth, until the whole company find themselves 
inextricably intertwisted and entangled in one complicated 
chain of love. When the cup came to my hands, I ex- 
amined it critically, both inside and out, and perceived 
it to be an antique and richly ornamented silver goblet, 
capable of holding about a quart of wine. Considering 
how much trouble we all expended in getting the cup to 
our lips, the guests appeared to content themselves with 
wonderfully moderate potations. In truth, nearly or quite 
the original quart of wine being still in the goblet, it 
seemed doubtful whether any of the company had more 
than barely touched the silver rim before passing it to 
their neighbors, — a degree of abstinence that might be 
accounted for by a fastidious repugnance to so many com- 
potators in one cup, or possibly by a disapprobation of the 
liquor. Being curious to know all about these important 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 391 

matters, with a view of recommending to my countrymen 
whatever they might usefully adopt, I drank an honest 
sip from the loving-cup, and had no occasion Tor another, 
— ascertaining it to be Claret of a poor original quality, 
largely mingled with water, and spiced and sweetened. J 
It was good enough, however, for a merely spectral or 
ceremonial drink, and could never have been intended for 
any better purpose. 

The toasts now began in the customary order, attended 
with speeches neither more nor less witty and ingenious 
than the specimens of table-eloquence which had hereto- 
fore delighted me. As preparatory to each new display, 
the herald, or whatever he was, behind the chair of state, 
gave awful notice that the Right Honorable the Lord 
Mayor was about to propose a toast. His Lordship being 
happily delivered thereof, together with some accompany- 
ing remarks, the band played an appropriate tune, and 
the herald again issued proclamation to the effeel that 
such or such a nobleman, or gentleman, general, dignified 
clergyman, or what not, was going to respond to the 
Right Honorable the Lord Mayor's toast ; then, if 1 mis- 
take not, there was another prodigious nourish of trum- 
pets and twanging of stringed instruments ; and finally 
the doomed individual, waiting all this while to be de- 
capitated, got up and proceeded to make a fool of him- 
self. A bashful young earl tried his maiden oratory on 
the good citizens of London, and having evidently got 
every word by heart, (even including, however he man- 
aged it, the most seemingly casual improvisations of the 
moment.) he really spoke like a book, and made incom- 
parably the smoothest speech I ever heard in England. 

The weight and gravity of the speakers, not only on 



392 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

this occasion, but all similar ones, was what impressed me 
as most extraordinary, not to say absurd. Why should 
people eat % good dinner, and put their spirits into festive 
trim with Champagne, and afterwards mellow themselves 
into a most enjoyable state of quietude with copious liba- 
tions of Sherry and old Port, and then disturb the whole 
excellent result by listening to speeches as heavy as an 
after-dinner nap, and in no degree so refreshing ? If the 
Champagne had thrown its sparkle over the surface of 
these effusions, or if the generous Port had shone through 
their substance with a ruddy glow of the old English 
humor, I might have seen a reason for honest gentlemen 
prattling in their cups, and should undoubtedly have been 
glad to be a listener. But there was no attempt nor im- 
1 pulse of the kind on the part of the orators, nor apparent 
expectation of such a phenomenon on that of the audi- 
ence. In fact, I imagine that the latter were best pleased 
when the speaker embodied his ideas in the figurative 
language of arithmetic, or struck upon any hard matter 
of business or statistics, as a heavy-laden bark bumps 
upon a rock in mid-ocean. The sad severity, the too ear- 
nest utilitarianism, of modern life, have wrought a radical 
and lamentable change, I am afraid, in this ancient and 
goodly institution of civic banquets. People used to 
come to them, a few hundred years ago, for the sake of 
being jolly ; they come now with an odd notion of pour- 
ing sober wisdom into their wine by way of wormwood- 
bitters, and thus make such a mess of it that the wine 
and wisdom reciprocally spoil one another. 

Possibly, the foregoing sentiments have taken a spice 
of acridity from a circumstance that happened about this 
stage of the feast, and very much interrupted my own 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 393 

further enjoyment of it. Up to this time, my condition 
had been exceedingly felicitous, both on account of the 
brilliancy of the scene> and because I was in close prox- 
imity with three very pleasant English friends. One of 
them was a lady, whose honored name my readers would 
recognize as a household word, if I dared write it ; an- 
other, a gentleman, likewise well known to them, whose 
fine taste, kind heart, and genial cultivation are qualities 
seldom mixed in such happy proportion as in him. The 
third was the man to whom I owed most in England, the 
warm benignity of whose nature was never weary of 
doing me good, who led me to many scenes of life, in 
town, camp, and country, which I never could have found 
out for . myself, who knew precisely the kind of help a 
stranger needs, and gave it as freely as if he had not had 
a thousand more important things to live for. Thus I 
never felt safer or cosier at anybody's fireside, even my 
own, than at the dinner-table of the Lord Mayor. 

Out of this serene sky came a thunderbolt. His Lord- 
ship got up and proceeded to make some very eulogistic 
remarks upon " the literary and commercial " — I ques- 
tion whether those two adjectives were ever before mar- 
ried by a copulative conjunction, and they certainly would 
not live together in illicit intercourse, of their own accord 
— " the literary and commercial attainments of an emi- 
nent gentleman there present," and then went on to speak 
of the relations of blood and interest between Great 
Britain and the aforesaid eminent gentleman's native 
country. Those bonds were more intimate than had 
ever before existed between two great nations, through- 
out all history, and his Lordship felt assured that that 
whole honorable company would join him in the expres- 



394 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

sion of a fervent wish that they might be held inviolably 
sacred, on both sides of the Atlantic, now and forever. 
Then came the same wearisome old toast, dry and hard 
to chew upon as a musty sea-biscuit, which had been the 
text of nearly all the oratory of my public career. The 
herald sonorously announced that Mr. So-and-so would 
now respond to his Right Honorable Lordship's toast and 
speech, the trumpets sounded the customary nourish for 
the onset, there was a thunderous rumble of anticipatory 
applause, and finally a deep silence sank upon the festive 
hall. 

All this was a horrid piece of treachery on the Lord 
Mayors part, after beguiling me within his lines on a 
pledge of safe-conduct ; and it seemed very strange that 
he could not let an unobtrusive individual eat his dinner 
in peace, drink a small sample of the Mansion House 
wine, and go away grateful at heart for the old English 
hospitality. If his Lordship had sent me an infusion of 
ratsbane in the loving-cup, I should have taken it much 
more kindly at his hands. But I suppose the secret of 
the matter to have been somewhat as follows. 

All England, just then, was in one of those singular 
fits of panic excitement, (not fear, though as sensitive 
and tremulous as that emotion,) which, in consequence 
of the homogeneous character of the people, their intense 
patriotism, and their dependence for their ideas in public 
affairs on other sources than their own examination and 
individual thought, are more sudden, pervasive, and un- 
reasoning than any similar mood of our own public. In 
truth, I have never seen the American public in a state 
at all similar, and believe that we are incapable of it. 
Our excitements are not impulsive, like theirs, but, right 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 395 

or wrong, are moral and intellectual. For example, the 
grand rising of the North, at the commencement of this 
war, bore the aspect of impulse and passion only because 
it was so universal, and necessarily done in a moment, 
just as the quiet and simultaneous getting-up of a thou- 
sand people out of their chairs would cause a tumult that 
might be mistaken for a storm. We were cool then, and 
have been cool ever since, and shall remain cool to the 
end, which we shall take coolly, whatever it may be. 
There is nothing which the English find it so difficult to 
understand in us as this characteristic. They imagine us, 
in our collective capacity, a kind of wild beast, whose 
normal condition is savage fury, and are always looking 
for the moment when we shall break through the slender 
barriers of international law and comity, and compel the 
reasonable part of the world, with themselves at the 
head, to combine for the purpose of putting us into a 
stronger cage. At times this apprehension becomes so 
powerful, (and when one man feels it, a million do.) that 
it resembles the passage of the wind over a broad field 
of grain, where you see the whole crop bending and 
swaying beneath one impulse, and each separate stalk 
tossing with the self-same disturbance as its myriad com- 
panions. At such periods all Englishmen talk with a ter- 
rible identity of sentiment and expression. You have the 
whole country in each man ; and not one of them all, if 
you put him strictly to the question, can give a reason- 
able ground for his alarm. There are but two nations in 
the world — our own country and France — that can put 
England into this singular state. It is the united sensi- 
tiveness of a people extremely well-to-do, careful of their 
country's honor, most anxious for the preservation of the 



396 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

cumbrous and moss-grown prosperity which they have 
been so long in consolidating, and incompetent (owing to^ 
the national half-sight edness, and their habit of trusting 
to a few leading minds for their public opinion) to judge 
when that prosperity is really threatened. 

If the English were accustomed to look at the foreign 
side of any international dispute, they might easily have 
satisfied themselves that there was very little danger of 
a war at that particular crisis, from the simple circum- 
stance that their own Government had positively not an 
inch of honest ground to stand upon, and could not fail 
to be aware of the fact. Neither could they have met 
Parliament with any show of a justification for incur- 
ring war. It was no such perilous juncture as exists 
now, when law and right are really controverted on sus- 
tainable or plausible grounds, and a naval commander 
may at any moment fire off the first cannon of a terrible 
contest. If I remember it correctly, it was a mere diplo- 
matic squabble, in which the British ministers, with the 
politic generosity which they are in the habit of showing 
towards their official subordinates, had tried to browbeat 
us for the purpose of sustaining an ambassador in an in- 
defensible proceeding ; and the American Government 
(for God had not denied us an administration of States- 
men then) had retaliated with stanch courage and ex- 
quisite skill, putting inevitably a cruel mortification upon 
their opponents, but indulging them with no pretence 
whatever for active resentment. 

Now the Lord Mayor, like any other Englishman, 
probably fancied that War was on the western gale, and 
was glad to lay hold of even so insignificant an Ameri- 
can as myself, who might be made to harp on the rusty 



CIVIC BANQUETS. 397 

old strings of national sympathies, identity of blood and 
interest, and community of language and literature, and 
whisper peace where there was no peace, in however 
weak an utterance. And possibly his Lordship thought, 
in his wisdom, that the good feeling which was sure to be 
expressed by a company of well-bred Englishmen, at his 
august and far-famed dinner-table, might have an appre- 
ciable influence on the grand result. Thus, when the 
Lord Mayor invited me to his feast, it was a piece of 
strategy. He wanted to induce me to fling myself, like 
a lesser Curtius, with a larger object of self-sacrifice, into 
the chasm of discord between England and America, and, 
on my ignominious demur, had resolved to shove me in 
with his own right-honorable hands, in the hope of closing 
up the horrible pit forever. On the whole, I forgive his 
Lordship. He meant well by all parties, — himself, who 
would share the glory, and me, who ought to have de- 
sired nothing better than such an heroic opportunity, — 
his own country, which would continue to get cotton and 
breadstuffs, and mine, which would get everything that 
men work with and wear. 

As soon as the Lord Mayor began to speak, I rapped 
upon my mind, and it gave forth a hollow sound, being 
absolutely empty of appropriate ideas. I never thought 
of listening to the speech, because I knew it all before- 
hand in twenty repetitions from other lips, and was aware 
that it would not offer a single suggestive point. In this 
dilemma, I turned to one of my three friends, a gentle- 
man whom I knew to possess an enviable flow of silver 
speech, and obtested him. by whatever he deemed holiest, 
to give me at least an available thought or two to start 
with, and, once afloat, I Avould trust to my guardian-angel 



398 CIVIC BANQUETS. 

for enabling me to flounder ashore again. He advised 
me to begin with some remarks complimentary to the 
Lord Mayor, and expressive of the hereditary reverence 
in which his office was held — at least, my friend thought 
that there would be no harm in giving his Lordship this 
little sugar-plum, whether quite the fact or no — was 
held by the descendants of the Puritan forefathers. 
Thence, if I liked, getting flexible with the oil of my 
own eloquence, I might easily slide off into the momen- 
tous subject of the relations between England and Amer- 
ica, to which his Lordship had made such weighty al- 
lusion. 

Seizing this handful of straw with a death-grip, and 
bidding my three friends bury me honorably, I got upon 
my legs to save both countries, or perish in the attempt. 
The tables roared and thundered at me, and suddenly 
were silent again. But, as I have never happened to 
stand in a position of greater dignity and peril, I deem it 
a stratagem of sage policy here to close these Sketches, 
leaving myself still erect in so heroic an attitude. 



THE END. 



CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON. 

I! 7k? 



